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GEORGE WASHINGTON 
After the Athenajum Portrait by Gilbert Stuart 



AN AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY 



DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY, Ph.D. 

.BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK 



rerurn cognoscere causas 



REVISED EDITION 




GINN AND COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON 
ATLANTA • DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO 



COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1917, 1920, BY DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY 

ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



322.9 



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gfte iStftenKum gregg 

GINN AND COMPANY • PRO- 
PRIETORS • BOSTON • U.S.A. 



EDITORIAL PREFACE 

The present volume represents the newer tendencies in historical 
writing. Its aim is not to tell over once more the old story in the 
old way, but to give the emphasis to those factors in our national 
development which appeal to us as most vital from the standpoint 
of today. However various may be the advantages of historical 
study, one of them, and perhaps the most unmistakable, is to explain 
prevailing conditions and institutions by showing how they have 
come about. This is our best way of understanding the present and 
of placing ourselves in a position to participate intelligently in the 
solution of the great problems of social and political betterment 
which it is 'the duty of all of us to face. Dr. Muzzey has not, there- 
fore, tabulated a series of historical occurrences under successive 
presidential administrations, but has carefully selected the great phases 
in the development of our country and treated them in a coherent 
fashion. He has exhibited great skill in so ordering them that they 
form a continuous narrative which will secure and retain the interest 
of the student. There is no question at any point of the importance of 
the topics selected and their relation to our whole complex develop- 
ment. All minor, uncorrelated matters, such as the circumstances 
attending each colonial plantation, the tactics and casualties of 
military campaigns, the careers of men of slight influence in high 
office, are boldly omitted on the ground that they make no perma- 
nent impression on the student's mind and serve only to confuse 
and blur the larger issues. 

Some special features of the book are its full discussion of the 
federal power in connection with the Constitution, its emphasis on 
the westward-moving frontier as the most constant and potent force 
in our history, and its recognition of the influence of economic factors 
on our sectional rivalries and political theories. It will be noted 
that from one fourth to one fifth of the volume deals with the history 
of our country since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Hitherto 
there has been a reluctance on the part of those who have prepared 

iii 



iv EDITORIAL PREFACE 

textbooks on our history to undertake the responsibility of treating 
those recent phases of our social, political, and industrial history 
which are really of chief concern to us. Dr. Muzzey has undertaken 
the arduous task of giving the great problems and preoccupations of 
today their indispensable historic setting. This I deem the very 
special merit of his work, and I am confident that it will meet with 
eager approbation from many who have long been dissatisfied with 
the conventional textbook, which leaves a great gap between the past 
and the present. 

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON 



PREFATORY NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION 

Besides bringing the narrative down into the administration of 
President Harding, the author has entirely recast that part of the 
book following the Spanish War and has made considerable changes 
in the preceding chapters. The changes are chiefly in the direction 
of added emphasis on social and economic factors in our history. 
New illustrative material has been added, the maps have been im- 
proved, and the bibliographical references have been brought down 
to date. The author takes this occasion to express his hearty thanks 
to many of his fellow teachers of American history throughout the 
country for their friendly criticisms and helpful suggestions. 

DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY 
Barnard College 

CoLUMBLA University 



cV 



I 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

PART I. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

r. The New World 

The Discovery of America 3 

A Century of Exploration 11 

11. The English Colonies 

The Old Dominion 26 

The New England Settlements 33 

The Proprietary Colonies 45 

The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century 56 

III. The Struggle with France for North America 

The Rise of New France 70 

The Fall of New France 79 

PART II. SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM 

ENGLAND 

IV. British Rule in America 

The Authority of Parliament in the Colonies 90 

Taxation without Representation 94 

The Punishment of Massachusetts , . . . J02 

V. The Birth of the Nation 

The Declaration of Independence no 

The Revolutionary War 116 

Peace 127 

PART III. THE NEW REPUBLIC 

VI. The Constitution 

The Critical Period 135 

"A More Perfect Union" 141 

The Federal Power 146 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER ^AG; 

VII. Federalists and Republicans ^^ 

Launching the Government 155 

The Reign of Federalism 164 

The Jeffersonian Policies 1 74 

TheWarofi8i2 180 



PART IV. NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

VIII. The Growth of a National Consciousness 

A New American Spirit 191 

The Monroe Doct^e 201 

IX. Sectional Interests 

The Favorite Sons 210 

An Era of Hard Feelings 216 

X. " The Reign of Andrew Jackson " 

Nullification 227 

The War on the Bank ...231 

A New Party 237 

PART V. SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

XI. The Gathering Cloud 

The Missouri Compromise 247 

The Abolitionists 255 

XII. Texas 

■ Westward Expansion 264 

The " Reoccupation " of Oregon and the " Reannexation " of 

Texas 270 

The Mexican War 275 

XIII. The Compromise of 1850 

The New Territory 282 

The Omnibus Bill 287 

A Four Years' Truce 292 



CONTENTS vii 

CHAPTER PAGE 

PART VI. THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

XIV. Approaching the Crisis 

The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the Formation 

of the Republican Party 301 

"A House divided against Itself '■ 308 

XV. Secession 

The Election of Abraham Lincoln 320 

The Southern Confederacy 326 

The Fall of Fort Sumter 331 

XVI. The Civil War 

The Opposing Forces 339 

From Bull Run to Gettysburg 344 

The Triumph of the North 358 

Emancipation 374 

PART VII. THE POLITICAL AND INDUSTRIAL HISTORY 
OF THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

XVII. Twenty Years of Republican Supremacy 

Reconstruction, 381 

The Aftermath of the War 390 

A New Industrial Age 402 

XVIII. The Cleveland Democracy 

A People's President . . . , 418 

A Billion-Dollar Country 427 

Problems of Cleveland's Second Term 437 

XIX. Entering the Twentieth Century 

The Spanish War and the Philippines . . * 45 1 

The Roosevelt Policies 464 

The Return of the Democrats 480 

XX. America and the World War 

Neutrality 497 

Participation 510 

Problems of Peace 524 

Appendix I i 

Appendix II v 

Appendix HI xxii 

Appendix IV , xxiv 

Index » , xxxi 



LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

George Washington (in colors) Frontispiece 

Types of Indian Dwellings, — the Pueblo, the Tepee, and the Long 

House 21 

Pilgrim Monument at Provincetown 34 

The Ambush of Braddock's Army 84 

Frankhn at the Court of France, 1778 118 

Group of Famous Revolutionary Buildings 131 

Lafayette 133 

The Capitol , . . . 146 

The White House 150 

Alexander Hamilton 160 

Washington's Honje at Mount Vernon 163 

John Adams 170 

Thomas Jefferson 1 74 

Henry Clay 214 

Andrew Jackson ....,,.... 227 

Webster's Reply to Hayne ,».... 230 

Abraham Lincoln 332 

Sherman's Army destroying the Railroads in Georgia 368 

Woodrow Wilson 484 

U. S. S. New Mexico in Gatun Locks, Panama Canal 492 

The Bridge at Chateau-Thierry 520 

Independence Day. American Soldiers saluting the Statue of Wash- 
ington, Paris, July 4, 191 8 522 



IX 



LIST OF FULL-PAGE AND DOUBLE-PAGE MAPS 

PAGE 

Voyages of Discovery in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries ... 9 
Early Maps of America (Lenox, Finasus, Miinster, Mercator) . . . 16, 17 

Exploration and Settlement in North America in the Sixteenth Century 23 

Proprietary Grants made by the Stuart Kings 5'i 

French Explorations of the Seventeenth Century about the Great Lakes 

and the Mississippi 7^6 

Map of the French and Indian Wars 85 

England's Acquisitions in America in the French Wars of 1689-1763 . 88 

The Revolutionary War on the Atlantic Seaboard 121 

The United States* in 1783 126 

The Louisiana Purchase Territory, with States subsequently made 

from it 1 78 

The War on the Canadian Border 185 

Routes to the West, 1815-1825 195 

North America in 1S15 . . . 202 

The Acquisition of the Far West, 1845- 1850 282 

Canals and Railroads operated in 1850 .' 295 

The Status of Slavery, 1844-1854 306 

The Presidential Election of i860 326 

Map of the Civil War 345 

Territorial Grovi^th of the United States . 430 

Map showing the Products of the United States 467 

The Greater United States and the Panama Canal Routes 474 

The Federal Reserve Districts . . . •_ 489 



AN AMERICAN HISTORY 



PART I. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF 
THE ENGLISH 




CHAPTER I 
THE NEW WORLD 

The Discovery of America 

^HE discovery of America was an accident. The 
brave sailors of the fifteenth century who 
turned the prows of their tiny vessels into the 
strange waters of the Atlantic were seeking 
a new way to the '^Indies," — a term vaguely 
used to denote not India alone but also China, 
Japan, and all the Far Eastern countries of 
Asia. From these lands western Europe had 
for centuries been getting many of its luxuries 
and comforts. Ever-lengthening traders' cara- 
vans brought oriental rugs, flowered silks, gems, spices, porcelains, 
damasks, dyes, drugs, perfumes, and precious woods across the plains 
and plateaus of middle Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea 
or crept along the hot borders of the Arabian peninsula to the head- 
waters of the Red Sea. At Constantinople and the seaports of Syria 
and Egypt the fleets of Genoa and Venice were waiting to carry the 
Indian merchandise to the distributing centers of southern Europe, 
whence it was conveyed over the Alpine passes or along the Rhone 
valley to the busy, prosperous towns of France, Germany, England, 
and the Netherlands. 

1. The Shifting of Trade Routes. In the fifteenth century there 
occurred two events which were destined to change the routes of the 
Eastern traders from the Mediterranean to the ocean highways. The 
capture of Constantinople by the Osmanli Turks in 1453 ruined 
the trade of Genoa, which had special privileges in that great capital 
of the Byzantine, or eastern Roman, Empire. And in 1498 Portuguese 

3 



4 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

mariners, sailing around the coast of Africa, reached India, whence 
they brought cargoes of spices to western Europe more cheaply than 
the Venetian traders, who depended on the long overland routes by 
caravan to the harbors of Syria and Egypt. By a series of wars, 
begun in the sixteenth century, the Turks drove the Franks (as they 
called all Europeans) from Syria and the islands of the ^Egean Sea, 
and put an end to the Mediterranean trade with the East. 

2. Maritime Science. The science of navigation was chiefly en- 
couraged by Prince Henry of Portugal (1394-1460), whose sailors 
pushed out into the uncharted waters of the Atlantic and ventured 
more than one thousand miles down the western coast of Africa. Ships 
were designed to sail close to the wind and to stand the buffeting 
of the high ocean waves. The compass and the astrolabe (for 
measuring latitude) were perfected. Six new editions of the " Geog- 
raphy" of Ptolemy^ were published between 1472 and 1492. In 
i486 Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and had 
not his crew refused to go farther from home, he might have stood 
out across the Indian Ocean and reached the Spice Islands of the 
East and all the cities of the Chinese Empire. 

3. Christopher Columbus. While Dias was making his way back 
to Portugal an Italian mariner from Genoa, named Cristoforo 
Colombo, better known by his Latinized name of Columbus, who 
had become convinced by his geographical studies that he could reach 
the Indies by sailing westward across the Atlantic, was seeking aid 
for his project at the courts of Europe. He first applied to the king 
of Portugal, in whose service he had already made several voyages 
down the African coast. On being repulsed he transferred his re- 
quest to Ferdinand and Isabella, the sovereigns of Spain, who finally 
granted him financial aid and created him admiral of all the lands 
and islands which he might find on his voyage. This was in April, 
1492. By the following August, Columbus was ready to start from 
Palos, with three small ships and about a hundred sailors, on what 
proved to be the most momentous voyage in history. 

Columbus was a student as well as a man of affairs. He shared 
with the best scholars of his day the long-established belief in the 

1 Claudius Ptolomseus, a Greek astronomer, wrote a " Geography " about the year 
A.D. 150, which remained the standard work on the shape and size of Europe, Asia, and 
Africa (the known world of the Middle Ages) until after the great voyages of the fifteenth 
century. 



THE NEW WORLD 5 

sphericity of the earth.^ As a guide for his voyage he probably had 
a chart made for the king of Portugal in 1474, by the Florentine as- 
tronomer Toscanelli, to demonstrate that the Indies could be reached 
by sailing westward. Toscanelli had calculated the size of the earth 
almost exactly, but, misled by the description of travelers to the 
Far East, he had made the continent of Asia extend eastward almost 
all the way across the Pacific Ocean, so that Cipango (or Japan) 




THE TOSCANELLI MAP OF 1474 

The actual position of the western continent is shown by the heavy black outline 

on his map occupied the actual position of Mexico. Columbus, 
therefore, although not deceived as to the length of voyage necessary 
to reach land, was deceived to the day of his death as to the land 
he reached at the end of his voyage. 

4. Columbus crosses the Atlantic. The little trio of vessels, 
favored by clear skies and a steady east wind, made the passage from 
the Canary Islands to the Bahamas in five weeks. No storms racked 

1 The popular idea that Columbus " discovered that the earth is round " is entirely false. 
More than eighteen hundred years before Columbus's day the Greek philosopher Aristotle 
demonstrated the sphericity of the earth from the altitude of the stars observed from various 
places. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, in 1267 even collected passages from the writers 
of classical antiquity to prove that the ocean separating Spain from the eastern shore of 
Asia was not very wide. The merit of Columbus was that he proved the truth of these 
theories by courageous action. 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



the ships, but still it was a fearsome voyage over the quiet seas. To 
the trembling crews each mile westward was a further venture 
into the great mysterious '' sea of darkness," where horrible monsters 
might be waiting to engulf them, where the fabled mountain of 
lodestone might draw the nails from their ships, or the dreaded 
boring worm puncture their wooden keels. The auspicious and un- 
varying east wind itself was a menace. How could they ever get 
home again in the face of it ? And if the world was round, as their 

captain said, were they not dail}^ 
sliding down its slope, which they 
could never remount ? In spite of 
ominous mutterings and overt 
signs of mutiny Columbus kept his 
prows headed westward, and at 
daybreak of October 12, 1492, 
sighted land. Surrounded by the 
naked awe-stricken natives, Colum- 
bus took solemn possession of the 
shore in the name of Ferdinand 
and Isabella and called it San 
Salvador ("Holy Saviour"). 

He then continued his voyage 
among the small islands of the 
Bahamas, seeking the mainland 
of Cathay (China). When he 
reached the apparently interminable coast of Cuba he was sure that 
he was at the gates of the kingdom of the Great Khan, and that the 
cities of China with their fabulous wealth would soon hear the voice 
of his Arab interpreter presenting to the monarch of the East the 
greetings and gifts of the sovereigns of Spain. He was doomed to 
disappointment. The misfortunes which dogged his steps to the 
end of his life now began. Martin Pinzon, pilot of the Pinta, 
deserted him on the coast of Cuba. His largest caravel, the Santa 
Maria, was wrecked on Christmas Day on the coast of Haiti, which 
he mistook for the long-sought Cipango, and he hastened back to 
Spain in the remaining vessel, the tiny Nina. He was hailed with 
enthusiasm by the nation and loaded with honors by his sovereigns, 
who had no suspicion that he had failed to reach the islands lying 




Columbus's flagship, the 

santa maria 



THE NEW WORLD 7 

off the coasts of the rich kingdoms of the East or that he had 
discovered still richer regions in the West. 

5. Columbus's Later Voyages and 111 Fortune. Columbus made 
three more voyages to the "Indies" in 1493, 1498, and 1502. On the 
voyage of 1498 he discovered the mainland of South x'\merica, and in 
1502 he sailed along the coast of Central America, vainly attempting 
to find a strait which would let him through to the main coast of 
Cathay. All the while the clouds of misfortune were gathering about 
him. His costly expeditions had so far brought no wealth to Spain. 
While his ships were skirting the pestilential coasts of South America 





THE MAURA MEDAL ( SPAIN), STRUCK TO COMMEMORATE THE FOUR- 
HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF COLUMBUS'S DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 



the Portuguese Vasco da Gama had reached the real Indies by the Cape 
of Good Hope and brought back to Lisbon cargoes of spices, satins, 
damask, ivory, and gold (see map, p. 9). The Spanish sovereigns 
were jealous of the laurels of the Portuguese mariners. Mutiny, 
shipwreck, and fever were lighter evils for Columbus to contend 
with than the plots of his enemies and the envious disappointment 
of the grandees of Spain. One of the Spanish governors of Haiti 
sent him home in irons. His young sons, Diego and Ferdinand, who 
were pages in the queen's service, were jeered at as they passed 
through the courtyard of the Alhambra : " There go the sons of the 
Admiral of the Mosquitoes, who has discovered lands of vanity and 
delusion as the miserable graves of Castilian gentlemen." Returning 
from his fourth voyage, in 1504, he found his best friend at court, 



8 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

Queen Isabella, on her deathbed, and, bowed with discouragement, 
illness, humiliation, and poverty, he followed her to the grave in 1 506. 
So passed away in misery and obscurity a man whose service to 
mankind was beyond calculation. His wonderful voyage of 1492 
had linked together the two hemispheres of our planet and " mingled 
the two streams of human life which had flowed for countless ages 
apart" (John Fiske).^ 

6. Pope Alexander VI's "Demarcation Line." Had Columbus 
and his fellow voyagers known that a solid barrier of land reaching 
from arctic to antarctic snows, and beyond that another ocean vaster 
than the one they had just crossed, lay between the islands they 
mistakenly called the Indies and the real Indies of the East, they 
would have probably abandoned the thought of a western route 
and returned to contest with Portugal the search for the Indies via 
the Cape of Good Hope. As it was, the Spanish sovereigns, con- 
fident that their pilots had reached the edge of Asia, asked of Pope 
Alexander VI a "bull" (or formal papal decree) admitting them 
to a share with Portugal in all lands and islands which should be 
discovered in the search for the Indies. The Pope, who was quite 
generally recognized in Europe as the arbiter of international dis- 
putes, acceded to the request, and in his bull of 1493 divided the 
undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal by a "demarcation 
line," which was fixed the next year by the Treaty of Tordesillas at 
three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. 
All lands discovered west of this line were to belong to Spain ; all 
east of it, to Portugal (see map, p. 9). 

7. John Cabot's Voyage. The Pope's bull, however, did not 
deter the other nations of Europe from taking part in the search for 
the Indies by both the eastern and the western routes. The honor 
of being the first of the mariners of Columbus's time to reach the 
mainland of the western continent belongs to John Cabot, an Italian 
in the service of King Henry VII of England. In the summer of 

1 Columbus was by no means the first European to visit the shores of the western conti- 
nent. There are records of a dozen or so pre-Columbian voyages across the Atlantic by 
Arabians, Japanese, Welshmen, Irishmen, and Frenchmen, besides the very detailed account 
in the Icelandic sagas, or stories of adventure, of the visit of the Norsemen to the shores of 
the western world in the year looo. Under Leif the Lucky the Norsemen built booths or 
huts and remained for a winter on some spot along the coast of Labrador or New England. 
But these voyages of the Norsemen to America five hundred years before Columbus were not 
of importance, because they were not followed up by exploration and permanent settlement. 









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10 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

1497, while the Spanish navigators were still tarrying among the 
West Indies, Cabot sailed with one ship from Bristol, and after plant- 
ing the banner of England probably somewhere on the coast of Labra- 
dor, returned to plan a larger expedition. The voyage of 1497 created 
great excitement in England for a time. '^ This Venetian of ours who 
went in search of new islands is returned," wrote an Italian in London 
to his brother at home; "his name is Zuan Cabot, and they all call 
him the great admiral. Vast honor is paid him, and he dresses 
in silk. These English run after him like mad people." The more 
prosaic account book of Henry VII contains the entry : " To hym 
that found the new isle io£." But interest in Cabot's voyage soon 
died out. The importance of the voyage for us is that it was for two 
centuries made the basis of England's claims to the whole mainland 
of North America. 

8. Amerigo Vespucci. Cabot's name is not connected with 
mountain, river, state, or town in the New World, but another 
Italian gave his name to the whole continent. Amerigo Vespucci 
was a Florentine merchant established at Cadiz in Spain. In 1501 
he made a most remarkable voyage in the service of the king of 
Portugal. Sailing from Lisbon, he struck the coast of South America 
at Cape San Roque and, running south to the thirty-fourth parallel, 
found the constant westward trend of the coast carrying him across 
the Pope's line separating Portuguese from Spanish territory. So he 
steered out again into the South Atlantic, then north in a straight 
course of four thousand miles to the coast of Sierra Leone (see map, 
p. 9). This voyage, which lasted over a year, showed that the land 
along whose northern shores the Spanish navigators had sailed was 
not an island off the southeastern coast of Asia, but a great continent. 
It led also to the naming of the western continent. 

9. The "New World" called "America." Vespucci wrote to 
Italian friends : " We found what may be called a new world . . . 
since most of the ancients said that there was no continent below 
the equator." Vespucci's "new world," then, was a new southern 
continent. In 1507 the faculty of the college of St. Die, in the 
Vosges Mountains, were preparing a new edition of Ptolemy's 
" Geography." Martin Waidseemiiller wrote an introduction to the 
edition, in which he included one of Vespucci's letters and made the 
suggestion that since in addition to Europe, Asia, and Africa, 



THE NEW WORLD ii 

^^ another fourth part has been discovered by Amerkus Vespucius 
. . . I do not see what fairly hinders us from calling it Amerige or 
America, viz., the land of Americus^ At the same time Waldseemiil- 
ler made a map of the world on which he placed the new continent 
and named it America. This map was lost for centuries, and scholars 
were almost convinced that it never existed, when in the summer of 
1 90 1 an Austrian professor found it in the library of a castle in 
Wiirttemberg. It had evidently circulated enough before its disap- 
pearance to fix the name " America " on the new southern continent, 
whence it spread to the land north of the Isthmus of Panama.^ 

10. Why the New World was not named for Columbus. The 
admirers of Columbus have protested against the injustice of the 
name '^ America" instead of ^'Columbia" for the New World, '^as 
if the Sistine Madonna had been called not by Raphael's name, but 
by the name of the man who first framed it." But there was no 
injustice done, at least with intent. ''America" was a name in- 
vented for what was thought to be a new world south of the equator, 
whereas Columbus and his associates believed that they had only 
found a new way to the old world. When it was realized that 
Columbus had really discovered the new world of which Vespucci 
wrote, it was too late to remedy the mistake in the name. So it 
came about that this continent was named by an obscure German 
professor in a French college for an Italian navigator in the service 
of the king of Portugal. 

A Century of Exploration 

11. The Explorers of the Sixteenth Century. From the death 
of Columbus (1506) to the planting of the first permanent English 
colony on the shores of America (1607) just a century elapsed, — 
a century filled with romantic voyages and thrilling tales of explo- 
ration and conquest in the New World. Nowadays men explore new 
countries for scientific stud}^ of the native races or the soil and its 
products, or to open up new markets for trade and develop the 

1 Although Waldseemliller himself dropped the name " America" when he realized that 
this was, after all, the land discovered by Columbus in 1498 and, in the same edition of 
Ptolemy for which he had written the Introduction, labeled South America terra incognita 
(■'unknown land"), the name "America" soon reappeared and gradually spread to the 
northern continent until, in. 1 541, the geographer Mercator applied it to the whole mainland 
from Labrador to Patagonia. 



12 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

hidden resources of the land ; but in the romantic sixteenth century 
Spanish noblemen tramped through the swamps and tangles of 
Florida to find the fountain of perpetual youth, or toiled a thousand 
miles over the Western desert, lured by the dazzling gold of fabled 
cities of splendor. The sixteenth century was furthermore a cen- 
tury of intense religious belief ; so we find a grim spirit of missionary 
zeal mingled with the thirst for gold. The cross was planted in the 
wilderness, and the soldiers knelt in thanksgiving on the ground 
stained by the blood of their heretical neighbors. Of course it was 
Asia with its fabulous wealth that was the real goal of European 
explorers. America was an obstacle. Until even far into the seven- 
teenth century the mariners were searching the northern coast of 
America for a way around the continent, and hailing the broad mouth 
of each new river as a possible passage to the Indies. 

12. Magellan's Ship sails around the World. With Columbus 
and Vespucci we must rank a third mariner, Ferdinand Magellan, 
a Portuguese in the service of the king of Spain. In September, 15 19, 
Magellan with five ships and about three hundred men started on 
what proved to be the most romantic voyage in history. Reaching 
the Brazilian coast, he made his way south and, after quelling a 
dangerous mutiny in his winter quarters on the bleak coast of 
Patagonia, entered the narrow straits (since called by his name) at 
the extremity of South America. A stormy passage of five weeks 
through the tortuous narrows brought him out on the calm waters 
of an ocean to which, in grateful relief, he gave the name "Pacific."^ 
Magellan met worse trials than storms, however, when he put out 
into the Pacific. Week after week he sailed westward across the 
smiling but apparently interminable sea, little dreaming that he had 
embarked on waters which cover nearly half the globe. Hunger 
grew to starvation, thirst to madness. Twice on the voyage of ten 
thousand miles, land appeared to the eyes of the famished sailors, 
only to prove a barren, rocky island. At last the inhabited islands 
of Australasia were reached. Magellan himself was killed in a fight 
with the natives of the Philippine Islands, but his sole seaworthy 
ship, the Victoria, continued westward across the Indian Ocean and, 

1 Magellan was not the first European to see that great ocean. Several years earlier ( 1 5 1 3) 
the Spaniard Balboa, with an exploring party from Haiti, had crossed the isthmus now named 
Panama and discovered the Pacific, to which he gave the name " South Sea." 



THE NEW WORLD 13 

rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reached Lisbon with a crew of 
eighteen "ghostlike men," September 6, 1522. 

13. Significance of Magellan's Voyage. Magellan's ship had 
circumnavigated the globe. His wonderful voyage proved conclu- 
sively the sphericity of the earth, and showed the great preponder- 
ance of water over land. It demonstrated that America was not a 
group of islands off the Asiatic coast (as Columbus had thought), 
nor even a southern continent reaching down in a peninsula from 
the corner of China (see maps, pp. 16-17), but a continent set off 
by itself, and separated on the west from the old world of Cathay 
by a far greater expanse of water than on the east from the old world 
of Europe. It still required generations of explorers by land and sea 
to develop the true size and shape of the continent of America ; 
but Magellan had located this continent at last in its relation to the 
known countries of the world. 

14. Cortez's Conquest of Mexico. While Magellan's starving 
sailors were battling their way across the Pacific, stirring scenes 
were being enacted in Mexico. The Spaniards, starting from Haiti 
as a base, had conquered and colonized Porto Rico and Cuba (1508) 
and sent expeditions west to the Isthmus of Panama (Balboa, 15 13) 
and north to Florida (Ponce de Leon, 1513). In 1519 Hernando 
Cortez, a Spanish adventurer of great courage and sagacity, was 
sent by the governor of Cuba to conquer and plunder the rich 
Indian kingdom which explorers had found to the north of the 
Isthmus. This was the Aztec confederacy of Indian tribes under an 
'' emperor," Montezuma. The land was rich in silver and gold ; 
the people were skilled in art and architecture. One of their re- 
ligious legends told of a fair-haired god of the sky who had been 
driven out to sea, but who would return again to rule over them in 
peace and plenty. When the natives saw the Spaniard with his 
"white-winged towers" moving on the sea, they thought that the 
" fair god " had returned. Cortez was not slow to follow up this 
advantage. His belching cannon and armored knights increased 
the superstitious awe of the natives. He seized their ruler, Monte- 
zuma, captured their capital city, Mexico, and made their ancient 
and opulent realm a dependency of Spain (1521). It was the first 
sure footing of the Spaniards on the American continent and served 
as an important baSe for further exploration and conquest. 



14 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

15. Spanish Pathfinders in America. The twenty years fol- 
lowing Cortez's conquest of Mexico mark the height of Spanish 
exploration in America. From Kansas to Chile, and from the Caro- 
linas to the Pacific, the flag and speech of Spain were carried. No 
feature of excitement and romance is absent from the vivid accounts 
which the heroes of these expeditions have left us. Now it is a 
survivor of shipwreck in the Mexican Gulf, making his way from tribe 
to tribe across the vast stretches of Texas and Mexico to the Gulf 
of California (Cabeza de Vaca, 1528-1536) ; now it is the ruffian 
captain Pizarro, repeating south of the Isthmus the conquest of 
Cortez and adding the untold wealth of the silver mines of Peru 
to the Spanish treasury (i 531-1533); now it is the noble governor 
De Soto, with his train of six hundred knights in ''doublets and 
cassocks of silk" and his priests in splendid vestments, with his 
Portuguese in shining armor, his horses, hounds, and hogs, all ready 
for a triumphal procession to kingdoms of gold and ivory, but 
doomed to toil, with his famished and ambushed host, through tangle 
and swamp from Georgia to Arkansas, and finally to leave his fever- 
stricken body at the bottom of the Mississippi, beneath the waters 
"alwaies muddle, down which there came continually manie trees 
and timber" (i 539-1 542) ; now it is Coronado and his three hundred 
followers, intent on finding the seven fabled cities of Cibola and 
chasing the golden mirage of the western desert from the Pacific 
coast of Mexico to the present state of Kansas (i 540-1 542). For 
all this vast expenditure of blood and treasure not a Spanish settle- 
ment existed north of the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of the six- 
teenth century. The Spaniards were gold seekers, not colonizers. 
They had found a few savages living in cane houses and mud pueblos, 
but the fountain of perpetual youth and the cities of gold they had 
not found. They could not, of course, foresee the wealth which one 
day would be derived from the rich lands through which they had 
so painfully struggled ; and the survivors returned to the Mexican 
towns discouraged and disillusioned. 

16. The Spanish Empire in America. South and west of the 
Gulf of Mexico, however, and in the islands of the West Indies 
the Spaniards had built up a huge empire. The discovery of gold 
in Haiti, and the conquest of the rich treasures of Mexico and 
Peru, brought thousands of adventurers and tens of thousands of 



THE NEW WORLD 



IS 



negro slaves to tropical America. Spain governed the American 
lands despotically. Commerce and justice were exclusively regulated 
through the " India House " at Seville. Trade was restricted to cer- 
tain ports. Heretics and their descendants to the third generation 
were excluded from the colonies. Many of the natives succumbed to 
the cruelty of the slave driver in 
the mines. The land was the prop- 
erty of the sovereign and by him 
was granted to nobles, who made 
their fiefs into great slave estates 
and treated both Indians and 
negroes with frightful severity. In 
spite of these evil features, however, 
Spanish colonization was a boon 
to the New World. The Spaniards 
introduced European methods of 
cultivation into the rich islands of 
Cuba, Porto Rico, Haiti, and 
Jamaica, and opened precious veins 
of gold and silver in Mexico and 
Peru. They built cities, dredged and 
fortified harbors, founded schools 
and universities, erected cathedrals 
and palaces. Spain, welded into a 
nation by the union of the crowns 
of Aragon and Castile (1469), her 
king elevated to the throne of the 
Holy Roman Empire in the person 
of Charles V (1519), was the most 
powerful state in Europe in the 

sixteenth century. Gold from the American mines enhanced the 
splendor of her throne, and her civilization, in turn, was reflected in 
her colonies in the New World. The decline of Spain's power began, 
however, with the wars which Charles's despotic son Philip II (1556- 
1598) waged to crush the liberty of his Dutch subjects, and the re- 
pulse which his great Armada met at the hands of Queen Elizabeth's 
seamen (1588). When the sixteenth century closed the vigor of 
Spanish colonization was gone. 




CORNER OF FORT MARION, 
ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA 

Built by the Spaniards, 1656-1756 




THE LENOX GLOBE (l510) SHOWING THE NEW WORLD AS AN 
ISLAND OFF THE COAST OF ASIA 




FIN^US' MAP (l53l) SHOWING THE NEW WORLD (amERICA) 
AS A PENINSULA ATTACHED TO ASIA 







munster's map (i540) showing land north of the 
isthmus attached to the new world 




MERCATOR'S map (1541) SHOWING THE NAME "AMERICA" FOR 
THE FIRST TIME APPLIED TO THE WHOLE CONTINENT 



1 8 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

17. The French Explorers. The Spaniards were the chief, but 
not the only, explorers in America in the sixteenth century. In 1524 
the king of France, scorning the papal bull of 1493, and jocosely 
asking to see old Adam's will bequeathing the world to Spain and 
Portugal, sent his Italian navigator, Verrazano, to seek the Indies 
by the western route. Verrazano sailed and charted the coast of 
North America from the Carolinas to Newfoundland, but did not find 
a route to Asia. Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River 
eleven years later to the Indian village on the site of Montreal. There 
his way to China was blocked by the rapids which were later named 
Lachine ("China") rapids. But wars, foreign and civil, absorbed 
the strength of France during the last half of the sixteenth century, 
and projects of colonization slept until the return of peace and the ac- 
cession to the throne of the glorious King Henry of Navarre ( 1 593 ) . 

18. The Elizabethan "Sea-Dogs." War, which was the death 
of French enterprise, was the very life of English colonial activity, 
which had languished since John Cabot's day. England and Spain 
became bitter rivals — religious, commercial, political — during Eliza- 
beth's reign (1558-1603). Elizabeth had no army to attack Philip 
in his Spanish peninsula, but she struck at the very roots of his power 
by seizing his treasure-laden fleets from the Indies. England's daunt- 
less seamen, Hawkins, Davis, Cavendish, and above all Sir Francis 
Drake, performed marvels of daring against the Spaniards, scour- 
ing the coasts of America and the high seas for their treasure 
ships, fighting single-handed against whole fleets, and even sailing 
into the harbors of Spain to " singe King Philip's beard " by burn- 
ing his ships and docks. Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe 
( 1 577-1 580), plundering the Spanish ships on every sea. When he 
returned to England with his enormous booty he was knighted by 
Queen Elizabeth on the quarter-deck of his vessel. 

19. Gilbert and Raleigh. From capturing the Spanish gold on 
the seas to contending with Spain for the possession of the golden 
land was but a step ; and we find the veteran soldier. Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert, receiving in 1578 a patent from Queen Elizabeth to "inhabit 
and possess all remote and heathen lands not in the actual possession 
of any Christian prince." Gilbert was unsuccessful in founding a 
colony on the bleak coast of Newfoundland, and his little ship 
foundered on her return voyage. His patent was handed on to his 



THE NEW WORLD 19 

half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth's favorite courtier. 
Raleigh's ships sought milder latitudes, and a colony was landed 
on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina (1585). The 
land, at Elizabeth's own suggestion, was named " Virginia," in honor 
of the '^ Virgin Queen." ^The colonists sought diligently for gold and 
explored the coasts and rivers for a passage to Cathay. But mis- 
fortune overtook them. Supplies failed to come from England on 
time, and the colony was abandoned. Three times Raleigh tried 
to found an enduring settlement (1585, 1586, 1587), but the 
struggle with Spain absorbed the attention of the nation, and the 
colonists preferred gold hunting to agriculture. Raleigh sank a pri- 
vate fortune equivalent to a million dollars in his enterprise and 
finally abandoned it with the optimistic prophecy to Lord Cecil : 
" I shall yet live to see it an Inglishe nation." 

20. The Indians. Wherever the European visitors had struck the 
western continent, whether on the shores of Labrador or the tropical 
islands of the Caribbean Sea, on the wide plains of the southwest 
or the slopes of the Andes, they had found a scantily clad, copper- 
colored race of men with high cheek bones and straight black hair. 
Columbus, thinking he had reached the Indies, called the curious, 
friendly inhabitants who came running down to his ships Indians, 
and that inappropriate name has been used ever since to designate 
the natives of the Western Hemisphere. In Mexico, Central America, 
and South America the Spanish explorers and conquerors found a 
higher native development in art, industry, architecture, and agricul- 
ture than was later found among the Indians of the North. Even 
the germ of an organized state existed in the Aztec confederacy of 
Mexico. Huge pueblos, or communal houses, made of adobe (clay) 
were built around a square or semicircular court in rising tiers 
reached by ladders. A single pueblo sometimes housed a thousand 
persons. The Aztec and Inca chiefs in Mexico and Peru lived in elab- 
orately decorated "palaces." Still the natives of these regions were 
by no means so highly civilized a race as the exaggerated accounts of 
the Spanish conquerors often imply. They had not invented such 
simple contrivances as stairs, chimneys, and wheeled vehicles. 
Their intellectual range is shown by the knotted strings which they 
used for mathematical calculations, and their moral degradation 
appears in the shocking human sacrifices of their barbarous religion. 



2 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

21. The Northern Tribes. The Indian tribes north of the Gulf 
of Mexico had generally reached the stage of development called 
^' lower barbarism," a stage of pottery making and rude agricultural 
science. Midway between the poor tepee, or skin tent, of the Pacific- 
coast savage and the imposing pueblo of Mexico was the ordinary 
"long house," or "round house," of the village Indians from Canada 
to Florida. The house was built of stout saplings, covered with bark or 
a rough mud plaster. Along a central aisle, or radiating from a central 
hearth, were ranged the separate family compartments, divided by 
thin walls. Forty or fifty families usually lived in the house, sharing 
their food of corn, beans, pumpkins, wild turkey, fish, bear, and buf- 
falo meat in common. Only their clothing, ornaments, and weapons 
were personal property. The women of the tribe prepared the 
food, tended the children, made the utensils and ornaments of beads, 
feathers, and skins, and strung the polished shells, or "wampum," 
which the Indian used for money and for correspondence. The men 
were occupied with war, the hunt, and the council. In their leisure 
they repaired their bows, sharpened new arrowheads, or stretched 
the smooth bark of the birch tree over their canoe frames. They had 
a great variety of games and dances, solemn and gay ; and they 
loved to bask idly in the sun, too, like the Mississippi negro of today. 

22. Character and Fate of the Indians. In character the Indian 
showed the most astonishing extremes, — now immovable as a rock, 
now capricious as the April breeze. Around the council fire he was 
taciturn, dignified, thoughtful, but in the dance he broke into 
unrestrained and uncontrollable ecstasies. He bore with stoical forti- 
tude the most horrible tortures at the stake, but howled in his wig- 
wam over an injured finger. His powers of smell, sight, and hearing 
were incredibly keen on the hunt or the warpath, but at the same time 
he showed a stolid stupidity that no white man could match. The 
Indian seems to have been generally friendly to the European on 
their first meeting, and it was chiefly the fault of the white man's 
cruelty and treachery that the friendly curiosity of the red man was 
turned so often into malignant hatred instead of firm alliance. 

There were probably never more than a few hundred thousand 
Indians in America. Their small number perhaps accounts for their 
lack of civilization. At any rate their development reached its highest 
point in the thickly settled funnel-shaped region south of the Mexican 



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22 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

boundary, where it has been suggested that they were crowded by 
the advance of a glacial ice sheet from the north. There are now 
about 325,000 Indians in the United States, including the civilized 
tribes. Many tribes have died out ; others have been almost com- 
pletely exterminated or assimilated by the whites. The surviving 
Indians, on their Western reservations or in the government schools, 
are rapidly learning the ways of the white men. It is to be hoped 
that their education will be wisely fostered, and that instead of the 
billion dollars spent on the forty Indian wars of the nineteenth 
century a few hundred thousand, dollars spent in the twentieth 
century on Indian schools like Hampton will forever divest the 
word "Indian" of its associations with the tomahawk, torture, and 
treachery.^ 

23. A Prophecy of our Country. The fairest portion of the 
continent of North America which the Spanish adventurers pene- 
trated in the sixteenth century, and whose edges the explorers of 
other nations touched, was destined to become the United States 
of America. It was blessed by nature with a variety of climate, 
abundant rainfall east of the Rocky Mountains, wonderfully fertile 
soil, and priceless deposits of coal and metals. It was destined in the 
i',second decade of the twentieth century to produce one fifth of the 
world's wheat, one third of its coal, iron ore, and tobacco, one half 
of its copper, two thirds of its oil and cotton, and three quarters of 
its corn. The mines of South Africa and Mexico alone yield larger 
supplies of gold and silver. Some lands, like France and Italy, have 
for centuries had a highly civilized population, but have been rel- 
atively poor in natural resources ; others, like Manchuria and Russia, 
have been marvelously endowed by nature, while their people have 
lacked the knowledge and enterprise necessary to exploit their wealth. 
But in the United States men and material have been admirably 
matched. As the tide of migration moved slowly westward, across 
the Alleghenies, across the Mississippi, across the great plains and 

1 The Indians, though always a subject of much curiosity, have only recently been 
studied scientifically. Our government, yielding to the entreaties of scholars who realized 
how fast the manners and customs of the natives were disappearing, established in 1879 ^ 
Bureau of Ethnology, for the careful study of the surviving vestiges of Indian life. To the 
reports of this bureau and to the researches of scholars and explorers connected with our 
various museums we are indebted for a great deal of valuable and fascinating information 
about the Indians, 




Scale of Miles 
200 400 600 800 1000 



EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT IN NORTH AMERICA IN THE 

SIXTEENTH CENTURY 



24 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

the crests of the Rockies and the Sierras, an intelligent and energetic: 
race of pioneers felled the forests, planted the rich river bottoms, and \ 
opened the veins of coal and iron. 

The process was slow. The early explorers and settlers on the 
Atlantic coast had no idea, of course, of the vast continent which lay 
before them. Even beyond the middle of the seventeenth century 
the French explorers believed that the Mississippi River emptied 
into the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean). The English settlers on the 
Atlantic coast did not begin to cross the Alleghenies till far into the 
eighteenth century. The Rockies were discovered in 1743, and within 
the next fifty years our Pacific coast was charted by explorers and j 
traders. Finally, in 1805, ^^ expedition sent out by the president 
of the United States reached the mouth of the Columbia River, 
linking together for the first time by the feet of white men our 
Atlantic and Pacific shores. That was more than three centuries after 
the voyages of Columbus and almost exactly two hundred years after 
the first permanent English settlement in America, to which we 
now turn. 

References 

The Discovery of America : John Fiske, The Discovery of America, 
Vol. I ; E. P. Cheyney, The European Background of American History 
(The American Nation Series), chaps, i-v; I. B. Richman, The Spanish Con- 
querors (Chronicles of America, Vol. II), chaps, i, ii ; Elroy M. Avery, 
History of the United States, Vol. I, chaps, v, vii-xv; E. G. Bourne, Spain 
in America (Am. Nation), chaps, i-vii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, 
chap, i ; Olson and Bourne, The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot (Original 
Narratives of Early American History) ; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Criti- 
cal History of America, Vol. I, chap, i; Vol. II, chaps, i-ii. 

A Century of Exploration: Fiske, Vol. II; Bourne, chaps, viii-xv; 
Cambridge Modern History, chap, ii ; Winsor, Vol. II, chaps, iv, vi, vii, ix ; 
Vol. Ill, chaps, i-iii; Hodge and Lewis, Spanish Explorers in the Southern 
United States (Orig. Narr.) ; H. S. Burrage, Early English and French 
Voyagers (Orig. Narr.) ; Wm. Wood, The Elizabethan Sea Dogs (Chronicles 
of America, Vol. Ill), chaps, i-xi; Richman, chaps, iii-vi; A. B. Hart, 
American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. I, Nos. 21-35; Edw. Chan- 
NiNG, History of the United States, Vol. I, chaps, iii-v ; L. Farrand, Basis of 
American History (Am. Nation), chaps, v-xvii ; Ellen Semple, American 
History and its Geographical Conditions, chaps, i, ii ; Ellsworth Huntington, 
The Red Man's Continent (Chronicles of America, Vol. I) ; Avery, chaps, ii, 
xvi-xxii. 



THE NEW WORLD 25 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. Geographical Knowledge before Columbus : Winsor, Vol. I, pp. 1-33 ; 
FisKE, Vol. I, pp. 256-294; Cheyney, pp. 41-7S; Avery, Vol. I, chap. v. 

2. Columbus's First Voyage: Olson and Bourne (Orig. Narr.), pp. 89- 
258 (Columbus's Journal); Fiske, Vol. I, pp. 419-446; Old South Leaflets, 
Nos. 29 and 33 (descriptions of voyage by Columbus and by his son). 

3. De Soto's Journey to the Mississippi : Hodge and Lewis (Orig. Narr.), 
pp. 129-272; Bourne, pp. 162-170; Winsor, Vol. II, pp. 244-254; W. Lowery, 
Spanish Settlements, pp. 213-252; E. G. Bourne, De Soto (Trail Makers Series). 

4. Raleigh's Attempts to found a Colony in Virginia : Burrage (Orig. 
Narr.), pp. 225-323; Hart, No. 32; Winsor, Vol. Ill, pp. 105-116; Old South 
Leaflets, Nos. 92, 119; Wood, chap. xi. 

5. The American Indians: Fiske, Vol. I, pp. 38-147; Farrand, pp. 195- 
271; Hart, Nos. 21, 60, 64, 91; Avery, Vol. I, pp. 338-368; Lowery, pp. 
27-78. 



CHAPTER II 
THE ENGLISH COLONIES 

The Old Dominion 

24. European Conditions favoring Colonization. The gorgeous 
dreams of gold and empire which filled the minds of the explorers of 
the sixteenth century slowly faded into the sober realization of the 
hardships involved in settling the wild and distant regions of the 
New World. To the romantic age of discovery succeeded the prac- 
tical age of colonization. The motives which led thousands of Euro- 
peans to leave their homes in the seventeenth century and brave 
the storms of the Atlantic to settle on the shores of the James and 
the Charles, the Hudson and the St. Lawrence, were those which 
have prompted migration in every age ; namely, the desire to get 
a better living and the desire to enjoy a fuller freedom. Now it 
happened that both these desires were greatly stimulated by the 
events of the sixteenth century in Europe. In the first place, the 
masses of the people, who had lived as serfs on the great feudal 
estates of the nobles in the Middle Ages, were finding more and 
more diversified employment as citizens of national states — artisans 
and mechanics in the towns, free tenant farmers, merchants and 
traders. In other words, a middle class (a bourgeoisie) was emerging 
and was beginning to amass money. At the same time the military and 
civil expenses of the kings, whose responsibilities were growing with 
their states, made taxes high and land dear. The limitless virgin 
lands of the New World offered a tempting relief for the hard-pressed. 

25. Protestant Revolt from Rome. In the second place, large 
parts of northern Europe had broken away from the ecclesiastical 
authority of the Roman Church in the sixteenth century, in the move- 
ment known as the Protestant Reformation. State churches were 
established in England, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, 
with the rulers in authority instead of the Pope ; and dissent from 
the doctrine of these established churches was treated not only as 

26 



P THE ENGLISH COLONIES 27 

religious heresy but also as political treason. But the spirit of free 
inquiry and religious innovation which had destroyed the unity of 
the Roman Church could not be held in check by rulers. Men 
claimed individual freedom of belief and worship. A great variety 
of religious sects appeared. Kings and princes tried to reduce them 
to submission, and the persecutions in Europe sent many refugees 
as colonists to the New World. 

26. England our "Motherland." From the seventeenth to the 
I twentieth century the tide of immigration has flowed from Europe 
j to America, until today less than one half the population of the 

United States are native-born with native-born parents. Yet these 
jl immigrants have not transported the political and social institutions 
of their own lands to the United States, but have themselves, with 
remarkable rapidity, adopted the speech, customs, and ideals of 
America. These are in their origin English. For although Spain and 
France held or claimed by far the largest part of North America, 
while the English settlements were still confined to a narrow strip 
along the Atlantic coast, nevertheless those English settlements ab- 
sorbed all the rest in their spread to the Pacific and made the Eng- 
lish civilization — English speech, English political ideals, English % 
common law, English courts and local governments, English codes of 1 
manners and standards of culture — the basis of American life. We 1 
severed our political connection with England by the Revolution, \ 
but we could not lay aside the culture or destroy the institutions in \ 
which our forefathers had been trained for centuries. We still re- 
mained the daughter country, though we left the mother's roof and 
set up our own establishment. 

27. The London and Plymouth Companies. Queen Elizabeth's 
long and glorious reign came to an end in 1603, when she was suc- 
ceeded on the throne of England by James Stuart of Scotland.^ In 
the year 1606 King James gave permission to "certain loving sub- 
jects to deduce and conduct two several colonies or plantations of 
settlers to America." The Stuart king had begun his reign with a 
pompous announcement of peace with all his European neighbors ; 

1 Since all the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, with the exception of Georgia, 
were settled under the Stuart kings, whose names will occur constantly in the pages of this 
chapter, it will be convenient for the student to review the main facts of the rule of the 
Stuart dynasty in Cheyney's " Short History of England," chaps, xiv-xvi, or more briefly in 
Robinson's " History of Western Europe," chap. xxx. 



28 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



consequently, though 
England claimed all 
North America by vir- 
tue of Cabot's discov- 
ery of 1497, James 
limited the territory of 
his grant so as not to 
encroach on the Span- 
ish settlements of Flor- 
ida or on the French 
interests about the St, 
Lawrence. One group 
of " loving subjects," 
called the London 
Company, was to have 
exclusive right to settle 
between 34° and 38° of 
north latitude (see 
map) ; the other group, 
the Plymouth Com- 
pany, was granted the 
equally broad region 
between 41° and 45°. 
The neutral belt from 
38° to 41° was left 
open to both com- 
panies, with the pro- 
viso that neither should 
make any settlement 
within one hundred 
miles of the other. The 
grants extended one 
hundred miles inland. 
The powers of govern- 
ment bestowed on the 
new companies were bs 
complicated as the grants of territory. The companies were to have 
a council of thirteen in England, appointed by the king and subject 




THE VIRGINIA GRANTS OF 1606 AND 1609 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



29 



to his control. This English council was to appoint another council 
of thirteen members to reside in each colony, and, under the direction 
of a president, to manage its local affairs, subject always to the au- 
thority of the English council, which in turn was subject to the king. 




28. The Settlement at Jamestown. In May, 1607, about^hun- 
dred colonists, sent out by the London Company, reached the shores 
of Virginia and, sailing some miles up a broad river, started a 
settlement on a low peninsula. River and settlement they named 
James and Jamestown in honor of the king. The colony did not 



30 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

thrive. By royal order the crops for five years were to be gath- 
ered into a common storehouse, and thence dispensed to the 
settlers, thus encouraging the idle and shiftless to live at the ex- 
pense of the industrious. Authority was hard to enforce with the 
clumsy form of government, and the proprietors in England were 
too far away to consult the needs of the colonists. Exploring the 
land for gold and the rivers for a passage to Cathay proved more 
attractive to the settlers than planting corn. The unwholesome site 
of the town caused fever and malaria. 

Had it not been for the almost superhuman efforts of one man, 
John Smith, the little colony could not have survived. Smith had 
come to Virginia after a romantic and world-wide career as a soldier 
of fortune. His masterful spirit at once assumed the direction of the 
colony in spite of president and council. His courage and tact with 
the Indians got corn for the starving settlers, and his indomitable 
energy inspired the good and cowed the lazy and the unjust. In his 
vivid narratives of early Virginia, the "Trewe Relaycion" (1608) 
and the " Generall Historie" (1624), he has done himself and his 
services to the colony full credit, for he was not a modest or retiring 
man. But his self-praise does not lessen the value of his services. 
In the summer of 1609 he was wounded by an explosion of gun- 
powder and returned to England. The winter following his de- 
parture was the awful " starving time." Of five hundred men in the 
colony in October but sixty were left in June. This feeble remnant, 
taking advantage of the arrival of ships from the Bermudas, deter- 
mined to abandon the settlement. With but a fortnight's provisions, 
which they hoped would carry them to Newfoundland, bidding final 
farewell to the scene of their suffering, they dropped slowly down 
the broad James. But on reaching the mouth of the river they espied 
ships flying England's colors. It was the fleet of Lord de la Warre 
(Delaware), the new governor, bringing men and supplies. Thus 
narrowly did the Jamestown colony escape the fate of Raleigh's 
settlements. 

29. Reorganization and Growth of the Colony. De la Warre 
brought more than food and recruits. The London Company had 
been reorganized in 1609, and a new charter granted by the king, 
which altered both the territory and the government of Virginia 
(see map, p. 28). Henceforth, as a large and rich corporation in 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 31 

England, the company was to conduct its affairs without the inter- 
vention of the king. Virginia was to have a governor sent out by 
the company. Under the new regime the colony picked up. Order 
was enforced under the harsh but salutary rule of Deputy Governor 
Dale (1611-1616). The colonists, losing the gold fever, turned to 
agriculture and manufacture. Tobacco became the staple product 
of the colony, and experiments were made in producing soap, glass, 
silk, and wine. A better class of emigrants came over, and in 16 19 
a shipload of '^respectable maidens" arrived, who were auctioned 
off to the bachelor planters for so many pounds of tobacco apiece. 
A little later the sharing of harvests in common was abandoned, and 
the settlers were given their lands in full ownership. In the words 
of one of the Virginia clergy of the period, '' This plantation which 
the Divell hath so often troden downe is revived and daily groweth 
to more and hopeful successe." 

The year 1619, which brought the Virginians wives and lands, 
is memorable also for two events of great significance for the later 
history of the colonies and the nation. In that year the first cargo 
of negro slaves was brought to the colony, and the first representative 
assembly convened on American soil. On July 30 two burgesses 
(citizens) from each plantation met with the governor and his six 
councilors in the little church at Jamestown. This tiny legislature 
of twenty-seven members, after enacting various laws for the colony, 
adjourned on August 4, "by reason of extreme heat both past and 
likely to ensue." Spanish, French, and Dutch settlements existed 
in America at the time of this first Virginia assembly of burgesses, 
but none of them either then had or copied later the system of 
representative government. Democracy was England's gift to the 
New World. 

30. Virginia a Royal Province. The man to whom Virginia 
owed this great boon of self-government, and whose name should be 
known and honored by every American, was Sir Edwin Sandys, 
treasurer of the London Company. Sandys belonged to the country 
party in Parliament, who were making James I's life miserable by 
their resistance to his arbitrary government based on "divine right," 
or responsibility to God alone for his royal acts. Gondomar, the 
wSpanish minister in London, whispered in James's ear that the 
meetings of the Company were "hotbeds of sedition." But James 



32 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



had let the London Company get out of his hands by the new charter, 
and when he tried to interfere in their election of a treasurer they 
rebuked him by choosing one of the most prominent of the country 
party (the Earl of Southampton, a friend of Shakespeare's) .^Hot- 
being able to dictate to the company, James resolved to destroy it. 
In a moment of great depression for the colony, after a horrible 
Indian massacre (1622) and a famine, James took the colony into 
his own hands and sent over men to govern it who were responsible 
only to his Privy Council. Virginia thus became a "royal province" 

(1624) and remained so for 
one hundred and fifty years, 
until the American Revolution. 
James intended to suppress the 
Virginia assembly (the House 
of Burgesses) too, and rule the 
colony by a committee of his 
courtiers. But he died before 
he had a chance to extinguish 
the liberties of Virginia, and 
his son, Charles I, hoping to 
get the monopoly of the to- 
bacco trade in return for the 
favor, allowed the House of 
Burgesses to continue. So Vir- 
ginia furnished the pattern 
which sooner or later nearly all 
the American colonies reproduced ; namely, that of a governor (with 
a small council of Americans) appointed by the English king, and a 
legislature, or assembly, elected by the people of the colony. 

31. "The Old Dominion." The people of Virginia were very 
loyal to the Stuarts. When the quarrel between king and Parlia- 
ment in England reached the stage of civil war (1642), and Charles I 
was driven from his throne and beheaded (1649), many of his 
supporters in England, who were called Cavaliers, emigrated to 
Virginia, giving the colony a decidedly aristocratic characte-r. And 
when Charles II was restored to his father's throne in 1660, the 
Virginian burgesses recognized his authority so promptly and en- 
thusiastically that he called them " the best of his distant children." 
He even elevated Virginia to the proud position of a "dominion," 




IN CELEBRATION OF THE THREE- 
HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 
SETTLEMENT OF JAMESTOWN 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 33 

by quartering its arms (the old seal of the Virginia Company) on 
his royal shield with the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 
The burgesses were very proud of this distinction and, remembering 
that they were the oldest as well as the most faithful of the Stuart 
settlements in America, adopted the name of " The Old Dominion." 

32. Bacon's Rebellion. Though there were actually many oc- 
casions of dispute between the governors sent over by the king and 
the legislature elected by the people, only one incident of prime 
importance occurrred to disturb the peaceful history of the Old 
Dominion under its royal masters. In 1675 the Susquehannock 
Indians were harassing the upper settlements of the colony, and Gov- 
ernor William Berkeley, who was profiting largely by his private inter- 
est in the fur trade, refused to send a force of militia to punish them. 
He was supported by an ''old and rotten" House of Burgesses, which 
he had kept in office, doing his bidding, for fourteen years. A young 
and popular planter named Nathaniel Bacon, who had seen one of his 
overseers murdered by the Indians, put himself at the head of 
three hundred volunteers and demanded an officer's commission of 
Governor Berkeley. Berkeley refused, and Bacon marched against 
the Indians without any commission, utterly routing them and saving 
the colony from tomahawk and firebrand. The governor proclaimed 
Bacon a rebel and set a price upon his head. In the distressing 
civil war which followed, the governor was driven from his capital 
and Jamestown was burned by the ''rebels." But Bacon died of 
fever (or poison) at the moment of his victory, and his party, being 
made up only of his personal following, fell to pieces. Berkeley 
returned and took grim vengeance on Bacon's supporters until the 
burgesses petitioned him to "spill no more blood." The rebellion 
forced the dissolution of the "old and rotten" assembly and the 
recall of Governor Berkeley. It showed that the people of the Old 
Dominion, though faithful to their king, would not tamely submit 
to despotic rule. 

The New England Settlements 

33. Activities of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. While these things 
were going on in Virginia a very different history was being en- 
acted in the northern regions granted to the Plymouth Company. 
This company sent out a colony in the very year that the London 
Company settled Jamestown (1607), but one winter in the little fort 



34 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

at the mouth of the Kennebec River, on the icebound coast of Maine, 
was enough to send the frozen settlers back to England. Sir Ferdi- 
nando Gorges, governor of Plymouth, was the moving spirit of the 
company, and, despite his losses in the expedition of 1 607-1 608, 
he showed a determination worthy of a Sir Walter Raleigh, In 16 14 
he sent John Smith to explore the coast of "northern Virginia,"' 
as the Plymouth grant was called. Smith made a map of the coast 
from Cape Cod to Nova' Scotia and called the land "New England." 
In 1620 Gorges persuaded the king to make a new grant of this 
territory to a number of nobles and gentlemen about the court, who 
were designated as the Council for New England. 

34. The Pilgrim Fathers. A few weeks after the formation of 
this new company there landed at Plymouth, from the little vessel 
Mayflower at anchor off Cape Cod, a group of one hundred men 
and women, known to later history as the "Pilgrims." They were 
not sent by the Council for New England or the London Company. 
Their object was neither to explore the country for gold nor to find 
a northwest passage to the Indies. They came of their own free 
will to found homes in the wilderness, where, unmolested, they 
might worship God according to their conscience. They were Inde- 
pendents, or Separatists, people who had separated from the Church 
of England because, when it broke away from the authority of the 
Pope in the reign of Henry VIII, it still retained in its worship 
many features of the Roman Catholic Church, such as vest- 
ments, altars, and ceremonies, which seemed to them "idolatrous." 
Three centuries ago religion was an affair of the state, not of 
private choice. Rulers enforced uniformity in creed and worship, in 
the belief that it was necessary to the preservation of their authority. 
If a subject could differ from the king in religious opinion, it was 
feared that it would not be long before he would presume to differ 
in political opinion, and then what would become of obedience and 
loyalty ! For men who were too brave to conceal their convictions, 
and too honest to modify them at the command of the sovereign, 
only three courses were open — to submit to persecution and martyr- 
dom, to rise in armed resistance, or to retire to a place beyond the 
reach of the king's arm. The history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
and eighteenth centuries is full of the story of cruel persecutions, 
civil wars, and exiles for conscience' sake. James I began his reign 




MONUMENT AT PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS, TO COMMEMORATE 
THE LANDING OF THE FIRST PARTY FROM THE MAYFLOWER 

Dedicated by President Taft, August 8, 1910 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 35 

by declaring that he would make his subjects conform in religion or 
''harry them out of the land." He ''harried" the Separatist con- 
gregations of some little villages in the east of England until in 1608 
they took refuge in Holland — the only country in Europe where 
complete religious toleration existed. Not content to be absorbed 
into the Dutch nation and have their children forget the customs 
and speech of England, the Separatists determined to migrate 









/tofu c-ueryi'nccj' 






Dy courtesy oi The Burrows Brothers Company, iroui Avery's " History ol the United States " 

FACSIMILE OF BRADFORD MS. HISTORY "OF PLIMOTH PLANTATION" 

to the new land of America. They goti permission from the London 
Company to settle in Virginia, but'Weir pilot brought them to the 
shores of Cape Cod, where they landed December 21, 1620, although j. 
they had neither a right to the soil (a patent) nor power to establish // 
a government (a charter). 

35. The ^^ Mayflower Compact" and the Plymouth Colony. 
Before landing, the Pilgrims gathered in the cabin of the Mayflower 
and pledged themselves to form a government and obey it. That; 
was the first instance of complete self-government in our history, 
for the assembly which met at Jamestown the year before the 
Pilgrims landed was called together by orders from the Virginia 



36 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



^^u^mm\wwmmmm\immim/rMi)ji^»A^MM/MiJiM 



Company in England. The winter of 1620-1621 on the ''stern and 
rock-bound coast" of New England went hard with the Pilgrims. 
'' It pleased God," wrote Bradford, their governor for many years and 
their historian, "^' to vissite us with death dayly, and with so generall 
a disease that the living were scarce able to burie the dead." Yet 
when the Mayflower returned to England in the spring not one of 
the colonists went with her. Their home was in America. They had 

come to conquer the wil- 
derness or die, and their de- 
termination was expressed 
in the brave words of one 
of their leaders: "It is 
not with us as with men 
whom small things can dis- 
courage." The little colony 
took its part bravely in the 
defense of the New Eng- 
land settlements against 




PASTOR OF JHE ENGLISH CHURCH WbRSHIrlNC OVER AGAINST 
»S^J!S,SPqT^AJD,;iS0?;ISe5..WHENCE,MtlS 
" ^V^^RTORTH: 



=Sv«iE'^XLIXYEARS3i 



lSMEM6Ri/#vErERNA;ERlTl<jiJSTUSi 






!;EREC--S:DjBrJrHE: ■NAtiONAL COUNCIL OF THE CONCREGATiONAt: 



U 







IlisMMii^llil' 






THE PILGRIM TABLET IN LEYDEN, HOLLAND 



the Indians and saw half 

its towns destroyed in the 

terrible war set on foot 

by the Narragansett chief 

''King Philip" in 1675.^ 

Finally, in 1691, it was 

annexed to the powerful 

neighboring colony of 

Massachusetts Bay. 

36. The Massachusetts Bay Company. In 1628 a company of 

Puritan^ gentlemen secured a grant of land from the Council for 

New England and the next year obtained from Charles I a royal 

1 King Philip's War was only the fiercest of many Indian attacks on the westward-moving 
frontier of the English settlements in the seventeenth century. We have already noticed 
the attack of the Susquehannocks on the Virginian frontier in 1675-1676 (p. 33). King 
Philip's War, of the same years, in New England was crushed by a combination of troops 
from the Massachusetts, the Connecticut, and the Plymouth colonies, but not until half of 
the eighty or ninety towns of those colonies had been ravaged by fire, some hundred thou- 
sand pounds sterling of their treasure spent, and one out of every ten of their fighting men 
killed or captured. 

2 The Puritans got their name from their desire to purify the Anglican worship of forms 
which were retained from the Roman Church, They did not secede from the Church (like 
the Separatists) , but tried to reform it. 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 37 

charter constituting them a political body ruled by a governor, a 
deputy governor, and eighteen '' assistants," all elected by the 
members of the company. In 1630 nearly a thousand emigrants 
sent out by the company arrived on the shores of Boston Harbor, 
the nucleus of the largest and most important of the English 
settlements in America — the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. The 
settlers carried their charter to Massachusetts, out of the reach of 
the king and his ministers, John Winthrop and John Cotton were 
the leading spirits of the colony in its first twenty years : the former, 
a cultivated gentleman from the south of England, serving almost 
continually as governor ; the latter, a scholar and preacher of great 
power, acting as director of the Massachusetts conscience. The 
object of the Massachusetts Puritans was to establish a colony in 
which they could enjoy a worship purified of what they called " the 
idolatrous remnants of popery" in the English Church. They did 
not open a refuge for freedom of worship. To keep their commu- 
nity holy and undefiled they refused to admit as " freemen" (that is, 
participants in the government) any but members of their own 
church. Others might live in the colony so long as they did not re- 
sist the authorities, molest the ministers, or bring discredit on the 
Puritan system of worship and government ; but they had to con- 
tribute to the support of the Church and submit to its controlling 
oversight of both public and private life. During the decade 1630- 
1640 the growing tyranny of King Charles and the persecutions of 
the zealous Archbishop Laud of Canterbury drove about twenty- 
five thousand refugees to the new colony. ''God sifted a nation," 
wrote a Massachusetts governor a half century later, " in order that 
he might send choice grain to this wilderness " ; but Archbishop 
Laud called the Puritans whom he drove into exile ''swine which 
rooted out God's vineyard." 

37. The Government of Massachusetts. The large emigration 
to Massachusetts brought about several important political results. 
It relieved the colony of immediate fear of attacks by the Indians ; ^ 
it enabled the authorities easily to drive out various companies of 

1 It must be added that the danger to both the Plymouth and the Massachusetts colonies 
in their early years from Indian attacks was much lessened by a terrible plague which had 
swept over eastern New England three years before the Pilgrims landed, and destroyed 
perhaps one half of the Indians from Maine to Rhode Island. 



38 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

settlers established by the agents of Gorges and other claimants tO) 
the Massachusetts lands under the grants of the Council for New 
England ; and finally it led to a representative form of government. 
^The freemen increased so rapidly that they could not come together- 
in a body to make their laws ; and after trying for a short time the ; 
experiment of leaving this power to the eighteen "assistants," the: 
towns demanded the privilege of sending their own elected representa- 
tives to help the assistants make the laws (1634). The more liberal I 
spirits of the colony protested against the narrowing of the suffrage : 
n to the " freemen " alone, but the Puritan leaders were firm in their 
I determination to keep out of the government all who were suspected 
jipf heresy in belief or laxity in morals. "A democracy" (that is, 
the rule of all the people) ''is no fit government either for Church 
or for commonwealth," declared Cotton ; and even the tolerant 
John Winthrop defended the exclusive Puritan system in a letter 
to a protesting friend by the remark : " The best part is always the 
least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." 

38. The Exile of Roger Williams. It was natural that this 
" Puritan aristocracy," which seemed so harsh to many colonists, 
should lead to both voluntary and enforced exile from the territory 
governed under the Massachusetts charter. Roger Williams, pastor 
of the church in Salem, taught doctrines very unacceptable to the 
Puritan governors of the colony. He said that the land on which 
they had settled belonged to the Indians, in spite of the king's 
charter, that the state had no control over a man's conscience, and 
that to make a man take the oath of citizenship was to encourage 
lying and hypocrisy. The civil authorities drove Williams from 
the colony in 1636. Making his difficult way southward in mid- 
winter through the forests, from one Indian tribe to another, he 
arrived at the head of Narragansett Bay and, purchasing a tract of 
land from the Indians, began a settlement which he called, in recog- 
nition of God's guidance, ''Providence." 

39. The Rhode Island Colony. Other dissenters from Massa- 
chusetts followed, and soon four towns were established on the 
mainland about Narragansett Bay and on Rhode Island proper. 
In 1643 Williams secured recognition for his colony from the Eng- 
lish Parliament, which the year before had driven King Charles 
from London. The little colony of "Rhode Island and Providence 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 39 

Plantations" so established was remarkable for two things, — de- 
mocracy and religious freedom. Election "by papers" (ballots) was 
introduced, and the government was "held by free and voluntary 
consent of all the free inhabitants." All men might "walk as their 
conscience persuaded them, every one in the name of his God." 
The scornful orthodox brethren in Massachusetts called Rhode 
Island's population "the Lord's debris," while the facetious said 
that " if a man had lost his religion, he would be sure to find it in 
some Rhode Island village." Massachusetts further showed her spite 
against the dissenting settlers by refusing to admit Rhode Island 
into the confederation of New England colonies, formed in 1643 for 
protection against the Indians ; and it was not till the colony had 
received a royal charter from Charles II (1663), recognizing its 
boundaries and its self-elected government, that it was securely 
established. For his heroic devotion to principles of freedom, far 
in advance of his age, Roger Williams deserves to be honored as 
one of the noblest figures in our colonial history. 

40. The Connecticut Settlements. The same year that Massa- 
chusetts drove Williams out of her jurisdiction the magistrates gave 
permission to "divers loving ffriends, neighbors, and ffreemen of 
Newetown (Cambridge), Dorchester, Watertown and other places, 
to transport themselves and their estates unto the Ryver of Conecti- 
cott, there to reside and inhabit." These emigrants were partly 
attracted by the glowing reports of the fertility of the Connecticut 
valley and partly repelled by the extreme rigor of the Massachusetts 
" aristocracy of righteousness," which made impossible honest expres- 
sion of opinion. Led by their pastor, Thomas Hooker, they tramped 
across the wilderness between the Charles and the Connecticut, driving 
their cattle before them and carrying their household goods in wag- 
ons, — the first heralds of that mighty westward movement which was 
to continue through two centuries to the Pacific Ocean. The Connect- 
icut emigrants founded the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethers- 
field on the "long river." In 1639 they adopted their "Fundamental 
Orders," — the first constitution drawn up in America, and the first 
in modern history composed by the free founders of a state.^ They 

1 The May/^ower agreement of 1620 was hardly a constitution, as it did not provide for 
a /o>^m of government, but only pledged its signers to obey the government which they 
should establish. 



40 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



did not require a man to be a church member in order to vote, and I 
their clergymen exercised far less influence over political life than 
those of the mother colony. Although they had trouble with Massa- 
chusetts, which still claimed that they were under her jurisdic- 
tion, and with the Dutch, who (as we shall see in the next section) 
had spread from the Hudson to the Connecticut, still the colonists 
of the river towns were strong enough to defend both their land 







EMIGRANTS EN ROUTE FROM MASSACHUSETTS TO CONNECTICUT 



and their government. After the extermination of the dangerous 
Pequot Indians in 1637 the colony enjoyed peace and prosperity. In 
1662 it was granted a charter by Charles II, extending its territory 
westward to the South Sea (the Pacific). 

41. The Puritan Colony of New Haven. John Davenport, a 
stem Puritan divine, founded a third seceding colony from Massa- 
chusetts when he took his congregation from Boston to the shores of 
Long Island Sound and started the settlement of New Haven (1638). 
The colony, which soon expanded into several towns, was even more 
strictly Puritan and " t heocrati c " (God-ruled) than Massachusetts. 
The founders hoped to add worldly prosperity to their piety by making 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 41 

New Haven a great commercial port, but the proximity of the un- 
rivaled harbor of New York (then called New Amsterdam) rendered 
any such hope vain from the beginning. Instead of becoming an inde- 
pendent commercial colony, New Haven and her sister towns found 
themselves, to their disgust, included in the limits of Connecticut 
by the royal charter of 1662. They protested valiantly against the 
consolidation, but were forced in the end to yield. Thus the New 
Haven colony ceased to exist in 1665. 

42. Massachusetts annexes the Settlements of Gorges and 
Mason. With the process of radiation from Massachusetts of colonies 
to the south and west went a contrary process of absorption by 
Massachusetts of settlements to the north and east. Ferdinando 
Gorges was the father of these settlements. He was a deadly enemy 
of Massachusetts. As a courtier he opposed the reforming party in 
Parliament, and as a stanch Church of England man he hated the 
whole Puritan movement. He secured a royal charter in 1639 which 
made him proprietor of Maine and labored strenuously to have strong 
anti-Puritan settlers emigrate to his province and to New Hamp- 
shire, the neighboring province of his fellow courtier and fellow 
churchman, John Mason. Massachusetts, whose territory, by th^ 
charter of 1629, extended from three miles north of the Merrimac to 
three miles south of the Charles (see map, p. 42), laid claim to these 
settlements. She annexed the New Hampshire towns in 1 641-1643 
and, after a long quarrel over the Maine towns, finally bought the 
claims of Gorges's heirs for £1250 in 1677. Charles II was incensed 
at the transaction. In 1679 ^^ separated New Hampshire from 
Massachusetts and gave it a royal governor ; but Maine remained 
part of the Bay Colony and then of the Bay State until 1820. 

43. The Spirit of the Massachusetts Colony. The domination 
of Massachusetts over the other New England colonies, at least up 
to the time when Connecticut and Rhode Island received their 
charters, was complete. She far surpassed them all in men and 
wealth. The New England Confederation, formed in 1643 by Massa- 
chusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, chiefly for defense 
against the Indians and the Dutch, was theoretically a league of 
four equal states, each having two members with equal voice in the 
governing council. But the opposition of Massachusetts kept Rhode 
Island out of the confederation, and in the question of declaring war 



42 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



on the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1653 the two Massa-- 
chusetts councilors vetoed the unanimous vote of the other six. The ; 
second half of the seventeenth century exhibited the character of' 
the colony in its most uncompromising and unlovely aspects. The 




THE NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS 



large-minded, courteous Winthrop died in 1649, ^^^ was suc- 
ceeded in the governorship by a harsh and bigoted Puritan '' saint," 
John Endicott. Faithfulness to Puritan ideals reached a point of 
fanatic cruelty, Quakers were hanged in 1660 on Boston Common 
for the crime of testifying to the ''inner light," or special divine 
revelation (which of course made Church and clergy superfluous). 
Again, in 1692, nineteen persons, mostly women, were hanged in 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



43 



Salem village for witchcraft, or secret alliance with Satan, on the 
most unfair evidence of excited children and hysterical women. 
On its political side the increasing power of the magistrates of 
Massachusetts aroused the angry suspicions of the king. The colony 
banished Episcopalians, coined money, omitted the king's name in 
its legal forms, and broke his laws for the regulation of their trade. 
When he sent commissioners 
in 1664 to investigate these 
conditions, they were insulted 
by a constable in a Boston 
tavern. Their chairman wrote 
back, " Our time is lost upon I 
men puffed up with the spirit 1 
of independence." Edward Ran- ' 
dolph, sent over a few years 
later as a collector of revenues, 
complained that ''the king's 
letters are of no more ac- 
count in Massachusetts than an 
old number of the London 
Gazette"'^ Finally, Charles II, 
provoked beyond patience, had 
the Massachusetts charter an- 
nulled in his court (1684), and 
the colony became a royal 
province. 

44. Edmund Andres in 
Boston. But before the great 
Puritan colony entered on its 

checkered career of the eighteenth century under royal gover- 
nors, it bore a conspicuous part in the overthrow of that tyranny 
which the last Stuart king, James II, made unendurable for free- 
born Englishmen. In 1686 James united New York, New Jersey, 
and all New England into one great province, which should be a 
solid bulwark against the danger of French and Indian invasion 

1 Randolph came at just the moment when Massachusetts was elated at having led the 
New England colonies victoriously through the severe war with King Philip, 1676 (see 
note, p. 36). 




THE PURITAN (bY AUGUSTUS 
ST. GAUDENS) 



44 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



from the north, and when his governor should rule absolutely, 
unhampered by colonial charters or assemblies. He sent over Sir 
Edmund Andros as governor of this huge province extending from 
Delaware Bay to Nova Scotia. Andros was a faithful servant and an 
upright man, but a harsh, narrow, unbending governor, determined 
that the instructions of his royal master should be carried out to the 
letter. He attempted to seize the charters of Connecticut and Rhode 

Island, but was baffled by the local 
patriots in both colonies. Exasper- 
ated by resistance, Andros made 
his hand doubly heavy upon Massa- 
chusetts. He dismissed the as- 
sembly, abolished the colonial 
courts, dispensed justice himself, 
charging exorbitant fees, estab- 
lished a strict censorship of the 
press, introduced the Episcopal 
worship in Boston, denied the 
colonists fair and speedy trials, and 
levied a land tax on them without 
the consent of their deputies. 

45. The " Glorious Revolution." 
The patience of the colony was 
about exhausted when the welcome 
news arrived, in April, 1689, that 
James II had been driven from the 
English throne. The inhabitants of 
Boston immediately responded by a popular rising against James's 
odious servant. Andros tried, like his master, to flee from the ven- 
geance of the people he had so grievously provoked, but he was 
seized and imprisoned, and later sent back to England. The town 
meeting of Boston assumed the government, appointed a committee 
of safety, and sent envoys to London to learn the will of the new 
king, William of Orange. Thus the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 
in Massachusetts was truly a part of the English Revolution of 
1688 and a foreshadowing of the greater Revolution begun eighty-six 
years later by the descendants of the men who expelled Andros in 
defense of the principles of the men who expelled James II. 




GOVERNOR EDMUND ANDROS 






THE ENGLISH COLONIES 45 

46. The New Massachusetts Charter. King William granted a 
new charter to Massachusetts in 1691, while Connecticut and Rhode 
Island quietly resumed government under their old charters, re- 
taining them as state constitutions well into the nineteenth century. 
The new Massachusetts charter provided for the union of Plymouth 
and Maine with the Bay colony under a royal governor and broke 
down the old Puritan regime by guaranteeing freedom of worship to 
all Protestant sects and making the possession of property instead of 
membership in the church the basis of political rights. Under this 
charter the Massachusetts colony lived until the American Revolution. 

The Proprietary Colonies 

47. The Nature of a Proprietary Province. Of the thirteen 
colonies which were later to unite to form the American nation, all 
except Virginia and the New England settlements were founded as 
proprietorships} The Proprietorship was a sort of middle thing 
between the royal province and the self-governing colony. The king / 
let the reins of government-out of his own hands, but did not give 

_them into the hands of the colonists. Between the king and the 
settlers stood the proprietor, a man or a small group of men, gen- 
erally courtiers, to whom the king had granted the province. The 
proprietors appointed the governors, established courts, collected a 
land tax ("quitrent") from the inhabitants, offered bonuses to 
settlers, and in general managed their provinces like farms or any 
other business venture, subject always to the limitations imposed by 
the terms of their charter from the king and the opposition of their 
legislatures in the colonies.- 

48. The Colony of Maryland. In 1632 George Calvert (Lord 
Baltimore), a Roman Catholic nobleman high in the favor of the 
court, obtained from Charles I the territory between the fortieth 
parallel of north latitude and the south bank of the Potomac, 

1 The proprietorship was not only the commonest form of colonial grant but it was also 
the earliest. Queen Elizabeth's patents to Gilbert and Raleigh were of this nature, and in 
the first half of the seventeenth century there were many attempts of proprietors, les3 
heroically persistent than Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to found colonies on our shores. 

2 All the proprietors except the Duke of York, King Charles II's brother, forthwith 
granted their provinces assemblies elected by the people. They could not, in fact, get 
settlers on any other terms. In the royal provinces too the popularly elected assemblies 
were retained. 



46 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

with a very liberal charter. The people of Maryland were to enjoy 
"all the privileges, franchises, and liberties" of English subjects; 
no tax was to be levied by the crown on persons or goods within 
the colony ; laws were to be made " by the proprietor, with the 
advice ... of the freemen of the colony." George Calvert died 
before the king's great seal was affixed to the charter, but his son, 
Cecilius Calvert, sent a colony in 1634 to St. Marys, on the shores 
of Chesapeake Bay. The second Lord Baltimore needed all his 
tact, nobility, and courage to meet the difficulties with which he had 
to struggle. The tract of land granted to him by King Charles lay 
within the boundaries of the grant of King James to the Virginia 
Company (see map, p. 28). A Virginian fur trader named Claiborne 
was already established on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay and re- 
fused either to retire or to give allegiance to the Catholic Lord 
Baltimore. It came to war with the Virginian Protestants before 
Claiborne was dislodged. Again, Lord Baltimore interpreted the 
words of his charter to mean that the proprietor was to frame the 
laws and the freemen to accept them ; but the very first assembly of 
Maryland took the opposite view, insisting that the proprietor had 
only the right of approving or vetoing laws which they had passed. 
Baltimore tactfully yielded. 

49. The Maryland Act of Toleration. Religious strife also played 
an important part in the troubled history of the Maryland settlement. 
Lord Baltimore had founded his colony chiefly as an asylum for the 
persecuted Roman Catholics of England, who were regarded as 
idolaters by both the New England Puritans and the Virginia Episco- 
palians. To have Mass celebrated at St. Marys was, in the eyes of 
the intolerant Protestants, to pollute the soil of America. As Balti- 
more tolerated all Christian sects in his province, the Protestants 
simply flooded out the Catholics of Maryland by immigration from 
Virginia, New England, and old England. Eight years after the 
establishment of the colony the Catholics formed less than 25 per 
cent of the inhabitants, and in 1649 the proprietor was obliged to 
protect his fellow religionists in Maryland by getting the assembly 
to pass the famous Toleration Act, providing that '' no person in this 
province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be in any ways 
troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion . . . 
so that they be not unfaithful to the lord proprietary or molest or 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 47 

conspire against the civil government established." Although this 
is the first act of religious toleration on the statute books of the 
American colonies, we should remember that Roger Williams, thirteen 
years earlier, had founded Rhode Island on principles of religious 
toleration more complete than those of the Maryland Act ; for, by 
the italicized words of the latter, Jews or freethinkers would be 
excluded from Lord Baltimore's domain. By 1658 the fierce strife 
between Catholic and Protestant had been allayed, and Maryland 
settled down to a peaceful and prosperous development. 

50. The Settlement and History of the Carolinas. Charles II, 
who took a great interest in the colonies in the early years of his 
reign, granted to a group of eight noblemen about his court, in 1663, 
the huge tract of land between Virginia and the Spanish settlement 
of Florida, extending westward to the "South Sea" (Pacific Ocean). 
The charter gave the proprietors powers as ample as Lord Baltimore's 
in Maryland. But the board of proprietors were not equal to Lord 
Baltimore in tact, energy, and devotion to the interests of the colony. 
Too many cooks spoiled the broth. The initial mistake was the at- 
tempt to enforce a ridiculously elaborate constitution, the "■ Grand 
Model," composed for the occasion by the celebrated English 
philosopher John Locke, and utterly unfit for a sparse and struggling 
settlement. A community grew up on the Chowan River (1670), 
founded by some malcontents from Virginia, and another on the 
shore of the Ashley River, three hundred miles to the south. The 
latter settlement was transferred ten years later (1680) to the site 
of the modern city of Charleston, South Carolina. These two widely 
separated settlements developed gradually into North and South 
Carolina respectively. The names are used as early as 1691, but 
the colony was not officially divided and provided with separate 
governors until 1711. There is little in the history of the Carolinas 
to detain us. It is a story of inefficient government, of wrangling 
and discord between people and governors, governors and proprietors, 
proprietors and king. North Carolina was described as " a sanctuary 
of runaways," where "everyone did what was right in his own 
eyes, paying tribute neither to God nor to Caesar." The Spaniards 
incited the Indians to attack the colony from the south, and pirates 
swarmed in the harbors and creeks of the coast. Finally, the as- 
sembly of South Carolina, burdened by an enormous debt from the 



48 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



Spanish-Indian wars, offered the lands of the province for sale to 
settlers on its own terms. The proprietors vetoed this action, which 
invaded their chartered rights. Then the assembly renounced 
obedience to the proprietors' magistrates, and petitioned King 
George I to be taken under his protection as a royal province 
(1719). It was the only case in our colonial history of a proprietary 
government overthrown by its own assembly. Ten years later (1729) 
the proprietors sold their rights and interests in both Carolinas 

to the crown for the paltry sum 
of £50,000. So two more colonies 
were added to the growing list 
of royal provinces. 

51. The Dutch on the Hud- 
son. While the Carolina pro- 
prietors were inviting settlers 
to their new domain, an Eng- 
lish fleet sent out by Charles II 's 
brother, the Duke of York, 
sailed into New York harbor 
and demanded the surrender of 
the feebly garrisoned Dutch fort 
on Manhattan Island (Sep- 
tember, 1664). The fort waa 
commanded by Peter Stuy- 
vesant, director general of the 
Dutch colony of New Nether- 
land, which had been founded fifty years before and was governed 
by the Dutch West India Company. The company established 
fortified trading posts at New Amsterdam (New York) and 
Fort Orange (near Albany), but they did not make a success 
of the colony, although they offered tracts of land eight miles deep 
along both sides of the river to rich proprietors ("patroons"), with 
feudal privileges of trade and government, and in 1638 abolished all 
monopolies, opening trade and settlement to all nations and making 
liberal offers of land, stock, and implements to tempt farmers. Even 
the city of New Amsterdam, with its magnificent situation for com- 
merce, reached a population of only sixteen hundred during the half 
century that it was under Dutch rule. The West India Company^ 




HENRY HUDSON S VESSEL, THE HALF 
MOON, IN THE HUDSON 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 49 

intent on the profits of the fur trade with the Indians of central New 
York, would not spend the money necessary for the development and 
defense of the colony. They sent over director generals who had little 
concern for the welfare of the people and refused to allow any 
popular assembly. If the settlers protested that they wanted a 
government like New England's, " where neither patroons, lords, nor 
princes were known, but only the people," they were met with the 
insulting threat of being "hanged on the tallest tree in the land." 
Furthermore, the Dutch magistrates were continually involved in 
territorial quarrels. When Henry Hudson sailed up the majestic 
river which bears his name (1609), he was trespassing on the ter- 
ritory granted by James I in 1606 to the Plymouth company. The 
Dutch disputed the right to the Connecticut valley with the emi- 
grants from Massachusetts and claimed the land along the lower 
banks of the South River (the Delaware), from which they had 
driven out some Swedish settlers by force.^ In 1653, when England 
was at war with Holland, New Netherland was saved from the 
attack of the New England colonies only by the veto of Massa- 
chusetts on the unanimous vote of the other members of the Con- 
federation of New England. 

52. New Amsterdam becomes New York. Every year the 
English realized more clearly the necessity of getting rid of this 
alien colony, which lay like a wedge between New England and the 
Southern plantations, controlling the valuable route of the Hudson 
and making the enforcement of the trade laws in America impossible. 
In 1664, therefore, Charles II, on the verge of a commercial war 
with Holland, granted to his brother, the Duke of York, the ter- 
ritory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers as a proprietary 
province. The first the astonished burghers of New Amsterdam 
knew of this transaction was the appearance of the duke's fleet in the 
harbor, with the curt summons to surrender the fort. Director 
General Stuyvesant, the "valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, ob- 
stinate, leather-sided, lion-hearted old governor," as Diedrich 

1 Although without the shadow of a claim by discovery and exploration, the Swedish 
court imitated those of England, France, and Holland by giving to its subjects charters to 
establish settlements on the shores of the New World. Between 1638 and 1647 five or six 
Swedish trading posts were set up along the banks of the Delaware River, near its mouth, 
but the home government made no provision for their defense and they were easily captured 
by the Dutch in 1655. 



so THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

Knickerbocker calls him, fumed and stormed, declaring that he would 
never surrender. But resistance was hopeless. The burghers per- 
suaded the irate governor to yield, although his gunners had their 
fuses lighted. New Netherland fell without a blow, and the English 
flag waved over an unbroken coast from Canada to Carolina. 

53. Absolute Rule in New York. There are still many traces 
in New York of its fifty years' occupancy by the Dutch. The names 
of the old Knickerbocker families remind us of the patroons' estates ; 
and from the car windows one gets glimpses of the high Dutch stoops 
and quaint market places in the villages along the Hudson, or sees 
a group of men at sundown still rolling the favorite old Dutch game 
of bowls, which Rip van Winkle found the dwarfs playing in the 
Catskills. But a far more significant bequest of New Netherland 
to New York was the spirit of absolute government. Under the 
Dutch rule the people were without charter or popular assembly, 
and the new English proprietor was content to keep things as they 
were, publishing his own code of laws for the province (the "Duke's 
Laws"). It was not till 1683 that he yielded to pressure from his 
own colony and the neighbors in New England and Pennsylvania 
and granted an assembly. Two years later, on coming to the throne 
as James II, he revoked this grant and made New York the pattern 
of absolute government to which he tried to make all the English 
colonies north of Maryland conform. What success his viceroy 
Andros had in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut we 
have already seen (p. 44). In New York the deputy governor, 
Nicholson, deserted his post and sailed back to England.^ When 
the new governor sent by King William III arrived in 1691, he 
brought orders to restore the popular assembly which James II had 
suppressed, and from that time on the colony enjoyed the privilege 
of self-government. 

New York grew slowly. At the time of the foundation of our 
national government it was only one of the ''small states" as 

1 The " revolution " in New York was headed by a fanatical demagogue, a German mer- 
chant named Jacob Leisler, who appropriated to himself the authority laid down by Nicholson 
and refused to surrender the fort on the Battery to King William's accredited agent before 
the arrival of the new governor. For this obstinate conduct Leisler was hanged as a traitor, 
although he protested that his only purpose in holding the reins of power was to prevent 
the Catholics in the colony from getting control of the government and betraying it to the 
French in Canada. He had done nothing more "treasonable" than had the leaders of the 
" glorious Revolution " in Massachusetts. 




PROPRIETARY GRANTS MADE BY THE STUART KINGS 

Showing how seven eighths of the Atlantic seaboard was granted to court 
favorites between 1632 and 1682 



52 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

compared with Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The im- 
mense Empire State of today, with its ten milHon inhabitants, is 
the growth of the last three generations. It began when the Erie 
Canal, and later the New York Central Railroad, made the Hudson 
and Mohawk valleys the main highway to the Great Lakes and the 
growing West. 

54. The Colonial History of the Jerseys. Even before the Duke 
of York had ousted the Dutch magistrates from his new province he 
granted the lower part of it, from the Hudson to the Delaware, to 
two of his friends, who were also members of the Carolina board of 
proprietors. Lord Berkeley, brother of the irritable governor of 
Virginia, and Sir George Carteret, formerly governor of the island 
of Jersey in the English Channel. In honor of Carteret the region 
was named New Jersey (June, 1664). The proprietors of New 
Jersey immediately published "concessions" for their colony, — a 
liberal constitution granting full religious liberty and a popular 
assembly with control of taxation. In 1674 the proprietors divided 
their province into East and West Jersey, and from that date to 
the end of the century the Jerseys had a turbulent history, despite 
the fact that both parts of the colony, after various transfers of 
proprietorship, came under the control of the peace-loving sect 
of Friends, or Quakers.^ New Jersey was put under the royal gover- 
nor of New York in 1702 and separated again in 1738. There were 
constant quarrels between proprietors and governors, between gov- 
ernors and legislatures, until New Jersey revolted, with the rest of 
the American colonies, from the rule of Great Britain. 

55. William Penn founds Pennsylvania. One of the Quaker pro- 
prietors of West Jersey in the early days was William Penn, a young 
man high in the favor of the Duke of York and his royal brother 
Charles, on account of the services of his father. Admiral Penn, to 
the Stuart cause. When the old admiral died he left a claim for 

1 The Friends, or Quakers, were a religious sect founded in England by George Fox in 
the middle of the seventeenth century. They believed that the " inner light," or the illumi- 
nation of the Divine Spirit in each man's conscience, was a sufficient guide for conduct and 
worship. They were extreme " democrats," refusing to remove their hats in the presence of 
any magistrate. The Quakers had begun to come to America as early as 1653 to preach their 
doctrines of religious and political independence. We have already seen how cruelly they 
were persecuted by the Puritan authorities of Massachusetts (p. 42). In every colony except 
Rhode Island they were oppressed, until William Penn realized the dream of their founder 
and established a Quaker colony in the New World, 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES S3 

some sixteen thousand pounds against King Charles II, and William 
Penn, attracted by the idea of a Quaker settlement in the New 
World, accepted from the king a tract of land in payment of the 
debt. He was granted an immense region west of the Delaware 
River, which he named '^Sylvania" (woodland), but which the king, 
in honor, he said, of the admiral, insisted on calling Pennsylvania 
(i68i).^ Charles II was in the midst of the quarrel with the stiff- 
necked colony of Massachusetts and was no longer willing to grant 
proprietors the almost unlimited powers which he had granted to 
Lord Baltimore and the Carolina proprietors. The Penn charter 
contained provisions that the colony must always keep an agent in 
London, that the Church of England must be tolerated, that the 
king might veto any act of the assembly within five years after 
its passage, and that the English Parliament should have the right 
to tax the colony. Disappointed that the charter of 1681 gave him 
no-coast line, Penn persuaded the Duke of York in 1682 to release 
to him the land which Stuyvesant had wrested from the Swedes on 
the Delaware in 1655, and which, in spite of Baltimore's protests, 
had been held as a part of New York ever since the English ''con- 
quest" of 1664. This territory, called the "Three Lower Counties," 
Penn governed by a deputy. The Lower Counties were separated 
from Pennsylvania in 1702 and, under the name of the colony of 
Delaware, were given their own legislature ; but they remained a 
part of the proprietary domain of the Penn family till the American 
Revolution. 

56. The Prosperity of Penn's Colony. Penn offered attractive 
terms to settlers. Land was sold at ten dollars the hundred acres, 
complete religious freedom was allowed, a democratic assembly was 
summoned, and the Indians (Delawares), already humbled by their 
northern foes, the Iroquois, were rendered still less dangerous by 
Penn's fair dealing with them. Emigrants came in great numbers, 

1 According to the charter Penn's grant was bounded on the south " by a circle drawne 
at twelve miles distant from Newcastle, Northward and Westward unto the beginning of the 
40th degree of Northern latitude." This confusing language is made all the more unintelli- 
gible by the fact that a circle drawn at a radius distance of twelve miles from Newcastle does 
not touch the fortieth parallel of latitude. Lord Baltimore's charter of 1632 gave him all the 
land "which lyeth under the 40th degree." The heirs of Penn and Baltimore quarreled over 
the boundary line for two full generations. Finally, in 1764-1767, two English surveyors, 
Mason and Dixon, ran the present boundary line (at 39° 43' 26")) which was agreed on by 
both proprietors. For the disputed territory see map, p. 51. 



54 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



especially the Protestants from the north of Ireland, who were 
annoyed by cruel landlords and oppressive trade laws, and the 
German Protestants of the Rhine country, against whom Louis XIV 
of France was waging a crusade. In the first half of the eighteenth 
century the population of Pennsylvania grew from twenty thousand 
to two hundred thousand. Philadelphia, the " city of brotherly love," 
which Penn had planned in 1683 " to resemble a green and open coun- 
try town," soon outstripped New York in population, wealth, and cul- 
ture and remained throughout the eighteenth century the leading 

city in the American colonies. 
Its neat brick houses, its paved 
and lighted streets, its printing 
presses, schools, hospital, and 
asylum, its library (1731), 
philosophical society ( 1 743 ) , 
and university ( 1 749) , all testi- 
fied to the enlightenment and 
humanity of Penn's colony, and 
especially to the genius and in- 
dustry of its leading citizen, 
the celebrated Benjamin Frank- 
lin ( 1 706-1790). 

57. The Character of Wil- 
liam Penn. William Penn was 
the greatest of the founders of the American colonies. He had all the 
liberality of Roger Williams without his impetuousness, all the fervor 
of John Winthrop without a trace of intolerance, all the tact of Lord 
Baltimore with still greater industry and zeal. He was far in advance 
of his age in humanity. At a time when scores of offenses were punish- 
able by death in England he made murder the only capital crime in 
his colony. Prisons generally were filthy dungeons, but Penn made 
his prisons workhouses for the education and correction of male- 
factors. His province was the first to raise its voice against slavery 
(in the Germantown protest of 1688), and his humane treatment of 
the Indians has passed into the legend of the spreading elm and 
the wampum belts familiar to every American school child. When 
Penn's firm hand was removed from the province (1712) disputes 
and wranglings increased between governor and assembly over taxes, 




PENN TREATING WITH THE INDIANS 



From an old woodcut 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 55 

land transfers, trade, and defense ; but the colony remained in the 
possession of the Penn family throughout the American colonial 
period. 

58. The Colony of Georgia. For the sake of completeness we 
must mention among these proprietorships the colony of Georgia, 
although it was founded long after the Stuart dynasty had given 
place to the House of Hanover on the English throne. In the year 
that George Washington was born (1732) James Oglethorpe ob- 
tained from the king a charter granting to a body of trustees for 
twenty-one years the government of that unsettled part of the old 
Carolina territory lying between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers 
(see map, p. 51). Oglethorpe, who, as chairman of a parliamentary- 
committee of investigation, had been horrified by the condition 
of English prisons, wished to provide an opportunity for poor 
debtors and criminals to work out their salvation in the New 
World. The Church was anxious for the conversion of the Indians 
on the Carolina borders. Capitalists expected to make large profits 
out of the industries of silk and wine introduced into the province. 
And the government, drifting already toward the war with Spain 
which was declared in 1739, was glad to have the English frontier 
extended southward toward the Spanish settlement of Florida. So 
Parliament, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign 
Parts, the Bank of England, and many private citizens contributed 
toward the new colony, which was established on the banks of the 
Savannah in 1733 and named Georgia after the reigning king, 
George II. Slavery was at first forbidden in the new colony, also the 
traffic in rum, which was a disgrace to the New England colonies of 
Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the colony did not prosper. 
The convicts were poor workers. The industries started were unsuited 
to the land. Not wine and silk, but rice and cotton, were destined to 
be the foundation of Georgia's prosperity. Oglethorpe battled man- 
fully for his failing colony and defeated the Spaniards on land and 
sea, but the trustees had to surrender the government to the king 
in 1752. The founder of the last American colony lived to see the 
United States acknowledged by Great Britain and the other powers 
of Europe as an independent nation. 



556 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century 

59. Royal Control in the Colonies. We have now traced the 
history of the establishment of the English colonies in America. It 
remains to devote a few pages to the economic and social condition 




MAP ILLUSTRATING THE GROWTH IN THE NUMBER OF ROYAL 
PROVINCES FROM 1682 TO 1752 

The royal provinces are colored red 



of the colonies in their maturity in the eighteenth century. A glance 
at the accompanying map and table (pp. 56 and 58) will show how 
steady the tendency was for the colonies, especially those founded 
by proprietors, to become royal provinces. Only Connecticut and 
Rhode Island escaped at least a short period of the king's control ; 
and repeated proposals were made in Parliament in the early years 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 57 

r 

of the eighteenth century to suppress the few remaining colonial 
charters and unite all the colonies into one large province of the 
English crown, to be governed by the king's officers and provided 
with a provincial assembly.' The causes for this tightening of royal 
control lay partly in the incompetency and selfishness of the pro- 
prietors, partly in the European politics,^ partly in the need for pro- 
jtection against the French in Canada and their Indian allies. But 
the chief cause of the king's interference in colonial affairs was his 
desire to control their trade and manufactures for the profit of the 
mother country. 

60. The Mercantile Theory of Commerce. The political econo- 
mists of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries quite commonly 
believed that a nation's wealth was measured not by the amount of 
desirable goods which it could produce and exchange but by the 
quantity of gold and silver which it could amass, — the miser's ideal. 
In accordance with this '^ mercantile " theory of commerce, as it was 
called, every nation tried to buy as little from others and sell as 
much to others as possible, so that the "favorable balance" of cash 
might come into its coffers. Naturally the European countries would 
look on their colonies, then, as places in which to sell goods. The 
colonies should furnish the raw materials — iron, wool, furs, hides — 
to the mother country, and then should buy back the finished prod- 
ucts — steel, clothing, hats, shoes — from the mother country, paying 
the difference in coin. Where the money was to come from, when 
the colonies were forbidden either to manufacture goods themselves 
or to sell raw material to the other nations, does not seem greatly 
to have concerned the European statesmen. They believed that 
colonies existed for the advantage of the mother country, and that 
if they could not increase the flow of gold and silver into her 
treasury, they were useless. 

61. The Navigation Acts. So Charles II's ministers were neither 
more nor less at fault than those of the European countries generally, 
when in 1 660-1 663 they fastened on the American colonies the 
Navigation Acts, or laws of trade. No goods could be carried into 
or out of the colonies except in ships built in the English domains 

1 With the accession of William of Orange, in 16S9, England was involved in a long 
period of war with France and needed to concentrate all her resources. See Cheyney's 
"Short History of England," cTiap. xvii. 



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58 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



59 



and manned by crews of which three fourths at least were EngUsh 
subjects. Certain " enumerated commodities," including tobacco, 
cotton- wool, and sugar (to which other articles, such as furs, rice, 
copper, naval stores, were added later), could not be exported from 
the colonies to any port outside the British domain. No European 
goods except salt and wine could be imported without first stopping in 
England to pay duties or be inspected. 
To be sure, England gave the enumer- 
ated colonial goods the preference, or 
even the monopoly, in her markets and, 
by a system of "drawbacks" or re- 
bates, reduced the duties which the 
colonies had to pay on goods shipped 
through English ports. Nevertheless, 
it was a hindrance to the commercial 
prosperity of the colonies to be forbid- 
den to sell directly in the markets of 
Europe, an inconvenience to be obliged 
to stop at England on all their return 
voyages, and a serious threat to their 
industrial life to be restricted in start- 
ing manufactures. It was like killing 
the goose that laid the golden eggs ; for 
only by trading with the French and 
Spanish Indies, which wanted their 
lumber, fish, and grain, could the col- 
onies get that coin which England de- 
manded to maintain her "favorable 

balance." The fact that five sixths of the laws passed by Parliament 
from 1689 to 1760, touching the colonies, were for the regulation of 
trade and manufactures shows how serious was this policy of 
restricting the commerce and industry of America. But for all 
the laws of Parliament, illicit trade flourished and was the founda- 
tion of many a considerable colonial fortune. Probably 90 per cent 
of the tea, wine, fruit, sugar, and molasses consumed in the colonies 
was smuggled. "If the king of England," said James Otis, "were 
encamped on Boston Common with twenty thousand men, and had 
all his navy on our coast, he could not execute these laws," 



AN ACT 

FOR 

Increafe of Shipping, 

And fcncouragcrocnt of the 

NAVIGATION 

OF THIS 

NATION. 

£>» tlic 3!nctcarc of 
tl)c aiKpping ant) tlje 
encouragement of ti)e 
fiA\3\aatim of tl)is 
/Nation, H)l)(tl) iinoct 
tl)c gooD p^obiDcnce 
anfipjotcctfonofiSoD, 
is fo great a means of 
tl)cnacifaccanDS>afe« 

t\' of tl)(s Commons 

iDealtD ise itcnactcDbp tt)(3 p;cfcnt paella^ 
iiient, ant) tlje •autljo>(ti> tftetcof , 5:t)atftoin 
anD after tl)c ifftttoapof December, C»nc tl)OU-. 
fanDli)cl)uut)jcDfiftv one, ana ftom tl)entcfoj» 
BjatDs , 00 OoDDs oj iommoDitics \Dt)atCo» 
net, of tlie (Siotttlj, pzoDuction oj fipamifa-- 

CtntC of Afia , Affiicj OJ America , OJ Of arp pait 

tfttteof i oj of anp31flanDs belonging to tt)cm, 
0} anv of tbtm , oj mhicD ate Offcnuco oj lain 
Boton m tl)c ufual ©aps o; <£arDE of WK 
places, asvbtliof tl)e«ngii(b Plantations as 
otljtts. Cballbe^lmpojteD o? Ujoogljt rnto tni» 
II dB i *'"' 

FACSIMILE OF THE NAVIGA- 
TION ACT OF 1651 




6o THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

62. Why the Navigation Acts were not Enforced. Fortunately 
for the economic life of the colonies, the king's ministers did not 
devote their serious attention to the enforcement of the Navigation 
Acts until the eighteenth century was some sixty years old. War 
with Louis XIV of France began when William of Orange ascended 
the English throne in 1689 and lasted almost uninterruptedly to the 
Treaty of Utrecht (1713). During the years 1721-1742, England's 
great peace minister, Robert Walpole, directed the government, wisely 
overlooking the irregularities of colonial commerce so long as its 
prosperity contributed to England's wealth and quiet. Toward the 
middle of the century the war with France was renewed, and the 
decade 1 750-1 760 witnessed the culmination of the mighty struggle 
for the New World between France and England, which will be 
the subject of our next chapter. We shall see how the removal of 
the French from America affected the colonial policy of England. 
Our interest at present is in noting that the long period of England's 
"salutary neglect" permitted the colonies to develop their trade 
and manufactures to a considerable degree, in spite of the restrictions 
imposed by the Navigation Acts. 

63. The Population of the Colonies. The American colonists 
numbered about 1,300,000 in the middle of the eighteenth century. 
They were mostly of English stock, though the Dutch were still 
numerous on the Hudson and the Delaware. French Huguenots had 

\ V come in considerable numbers to the middle and lower colonies, Ger- 
mans from the Rhine country had settled in Pennsylvania, and the 
JScotch-Irish, that sterling, hardy race of men which has given us 
some of the most distinguished names in our history, had come in 
great numbers to Pennsylvania and thence passed up the Shenandoah 
, valley into Virginia and the Carolinas. Immigration practically 
■ ceased about 1730, not to be renewed on a large scale until the age 
pi steamships a century later. There were between two and three 
hundred thousand negro slaves distributed through the colonies, — 
a few house servants and men of all work in the New England States, 
a greater number in the Middle States and Virginia, while farther 
south they even outnumbered the whites in some districts of South 
Carolina and Georgia. There were well-defined types of colonial 
society, due to circumstances of emigration from Europe, conditions 
of the soil, political institutions, and religious beliefs. These types 



u 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



6i 



were the more marked, as there were no adequate means of com- 
munication or routes of travel between the colonies. 

64. The New England Type of Character. New England was 
inhabited by pure English stock and retained for many generations 
its Puritan character. The early immigrants had come in congrega- 
tions and settled in compact groups, making little self-governing; I 
towns clustered about the church, the school, and the village green. ^1 
Learning was more carefully nurtured and widely diffused in New 




HARVARD COLLEGE IN 1726 



England than anywhere else in the colonies.^ Before 1650 public- 
school instruction had been made compulsory in all New England 
except Rhode Island, in order '' that learning," in the noble words 
of the Massachusetts statute, " might not be buried in the graves of 
the fathers." Harvard College was established six years after Win- 
throp's landing, and " before the nightly howl of the wolf had ceased 
from the outskirts of their villages" the Massachusetts settlers had 
made provision whereby their young men might study the master 

1 J^h^_P_uritan leaders^of the New England settlements were highly educated men, who 
prized learning for the support it furnished to their independent religious ideas. Where the 
interpretation of Scripture depended, as it did in the Puritan system, on one's own enlight- 
ened mind, universal education was a necessity. The Massachusetts legislature, which voted 
;^^oo in 1636 " to found a college at Newtowne " (Cambridge), was " the first body in which 
the people by their representatives ever gave their own money to found a place of education " 
(Quincy, History of Harvard University, Vol. II, p. 654). 



62 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

minds of the world. The excellent Earl of Bellomont, coming as 
royal governor to Massachusetts in 1700, wondered how so much 
learning could exist in the province side by side with so much 
fanaticism. The stony soil and rigorous climate of New England 
made the farmer's life a fit preparation for enduring the rough march 
or toiling on the rude fortifications against the Indians, whose war 
whoop so often interrupted his plowing and planting. The schools of 
bluefish, mackerel, and cod off the coast developed a race of hardy 
fishermen in the seaport towns ; while the fleet sloops and cutters of 
the aristocratic merchants slipped by the customs patrol with the 
smuggled goods of the Indies. Until the rise of a class of brilliant 
young lawyers like Otis and the Adamses, on the eve of the Revolu- 
tionary War, the clergy were the undisputed leaders of society. 
Education was entirely in their hands, and the magistrates were con- 
trolled by a public opinion largely inspired from the pulpits of the 
Puritan divines. With the virtues of soberness, industry, scrupulous 
conscientiousness, and a high standard of private and public moral- 
ity, Puritanism also unfortunately developed narrowness, self- 
righteousness, and unwholesome cultivation of the austere and joyless 
sides of life. The first play that ventured to invite the applause of 
a New England audience, " The Orphan," enacted in a Boston coffee- 
house in 1750, was prohibited as '' tending to discourage industry and 
frugality and greatly to increase impiety." At the same time New 
York, Baltimore, and cities to the south were centers of gayety. 

65. Contrasts of Colonial Life. No greater contrast could be 
imagined than that of the hardy old Puritan divine, Samuel Emery, 
preaching interminable sermons in the arctic cold of a Maine meet- 
inghouse without seats, windows, or plaster, on a salary of £45 a 
year, payable one half in farm truck and firewood, prepared every 
moment to seize his musket at the sound of the Indian war whoop, 
and fortified by inward grace against the still more redoubtable 
attacks of the tart tongues of '^frightfully turbulent women" in his 
congregation ; and the rich Carolina planter, wintering among the 
fashionable throng at Charleston, sipping costly wines at gay suppers, 
handing richly gowned women to their chariots with the grace of 
King Louis's courtiers, gaming, dueling, drinking, and remitting 
generous sums of his plantation profits to the son established in 
gentleman's quarters at Tory Oxford. Of course such a picture is 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



63 



not fair to the average life in the colonies, north and south. There 
were wealthy aristocrats among the Puritans of New England, as 
" Tory Row " in Cambridge testified ; and there were numerous 
settlers of hardy Huguenot and Scotch-Irish stock in Virginia and 
the Carolinas. Nevertheless, the contrast between stern New England 
and the more aristocratic colonies south of the Potomac was marked. 




A COLONIAL MANSION IN THE SOUTH 
Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello, Charlottesville, Va. 



66. Colonial Society in the South. The rich soil of the South, 
with its staple crops of tobacco and rice, favored the plantation sys- 
tem and slave labor. Broad navigable rivers, reaching well up into 
the level lands, gave every planter his private wharf and made the 
huge plantations resemble feudal estates, with their stately manor 
houses dominating the stables, the storage sheds, and the clustering 
huts of the slave quarters. In Virginia, and perhaps to some extent 
in the Carolinas, these estates, by the laws of "primogeniture" and 
" entail," descended undivided to the eldest son of the family, while 
the younger sons either entered the ranks of the clergy and the 
professions of physicians and lawyers or sometimes became shiftless 
dependents and rovers. A public-school system was impossible when 



64 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

the white population was so scattered that a planter needed a field 
glass to see his neighbor's house. The slaves might be taught the 
elements of religion by a conscientious mistress, but " book learn- 
ing " was no part of their equipment for the rice swamps, the kitchen, 
or the hunting stables. On court days the squires and rustics gath- 
ered at the county center, making a holiday with racing and speech 
making ; but the tense and steady political interest of the New 
England town meeting was unknown.^ 

67. The Middle Colonies. The settlements between the Hudson 
and the Potomac were " middle colonies " in character as well as in 
situation, — between the puritanical, democratic type of New Eng- 
land, and the urbane, aristocratic, hospitable society of the South, 
so tenacious of rank and tradition. Politically these middle colonies 
combined some ^features of both the township government of the 
North and the (county government of the South. They were (as 
they still are) costnopolitan in population, and the region was most 
attractive to foreign immigration, A Jesuit missionary of Canada 
passing through New Amsterdam in 1643 found eighteen languages 
spoken among its four hundred inhabitants and noted an intense 
devotion to money making, which precluded much interest in edu- 
cation or religion. There were but two churches in the city when 
it was surrendered to the English in 1664. 

68. Civilization developed Slowly in the Colonies. In lands 
so recently reclaimed from the virgin foresf and the savage Indian 
as were the American colonies the progress of civilization was natu- 
rally slow. As late as the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, John 
Dickinson of Pennsylvania could write, '' Some few towns excepted, 
we are all tillers of the soil from Nova Scotia to West Florida." 
Still Benjamin Franklin, already high in the estimation of Europeans 
for his scientific discoveries, when founding the first American 
Philosophical Society (1743), wrote: "The first drudgery of settling 
new colonies is pretty well over, and there were many in every colony 
in circumstances which set them at ease to cultivate the finer arts 
and improve the common stock of knowledge." An enterprising 
governor of New York, toward the end of the seventeenth century, 

1 In Virginia local courts were developed early in the seventeenth century, but in South 
Carolina every magistrate was appointed in Charleston and every court held there. Of 
county or township government there was no trace until after the Civil War- 



I 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 



65 



started a monthly postal service between New York and Boston, over 
the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield route now followed by the 
railroad. In 1710 Parliament extended ^e British post office to 
America, with headquarters established at New York, and postal 
routes reaching from the Maine border on the north to Williamsburg, 




FARM AND HOUSEHOLD IMPLEMENTS OF COLONIAL DAYS 



the capital of Virginia, on the south. Later Benjamin Franklin 
served for many years as postmaster-general of the colonies, and 
administered the office with great diligence and skill. 

69. Education in the Colonies. Public schools existed from the 
first in New England, as we have seen, but were not established in 
the middle and southern colonies until the eighteenth century. For 
over half a century Harvard was the only college in America ; then 
followed William and Mary in Virginia (1693), Yale in Connecticut 
(1701), Princeton in New Jersey (1746), Philadelphia (now the 
University of Pennsylvania) (1749), King's (now Columbia) in New 
York (1754), Rhode Island (now Brown University) (1764). The 



66 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

first medical treatise in America was published by Thomas Thacher 
in Boston in 1678, ^Uo guide the common people of New England 
how to order themselves #id theirs in the Small Pocks or Measels." 
But it was a full century before the first medical school was opened 
in Philadelphia, with lectures in anatomy, botany, and Lavoisier's 
discoveries in chemistry. Even then the science of medicine was 
crude and clumsy beyond belief. George Washington's life was sac- 
rificed to medical ignorance in 1799. He was "bled" three times 

The Boflon News-Letter. 



From g^onDap April 17. to fl^OllDav Af ril 24. 1704. 

• LovM eipng'P'Jl from Dccmh. iJ. to Afb. 170?. 1 From all this he infers, That they have hopes of 
- r c , J L • 1 i- r j'^^''^*"" '^rom France, otherwife they would never 

LEmrs from Sco/W bring us the Copy oF I be fo impudent , and he gives Reafons for his Ap- 
a Sheet lately Pnnted there, Intituled, j4 I prehcnfions that the Fnnch King may fend TtoodJ 
fenfinMt Alarm for Scotland. In n Utttr thither this Winter, i. Becaufe the EngMh S(,Dutch 
, from »Cmi!emnn in the City, to hi, Fnmd m- will not then be at Sea to oppofe them z He can 
thi Country, concerning the prefer,, Danger then bcft fpare them, the Seafon of Aaion beyond 
i^^K-nidcm mi of the PrcteJUnt Kdigim Sea bcmg over. ?. The Expcflation given him of a 

7 his Letter tales Notice, ThatPapifts fwann m confidcrable number tojoyn tliem, may inrourage 
'that i^ation, that they traffick more avowedly than him to the undertaking with fewer Men,if he cart 
formerly, and thai of late many Scores of Priefts & but fend over a fufficient number of Officers with 
Jeluites arc come thither from France, and gone to Arms and Ammunition. 

the North, to the Highlands & other places of the He endeavours in the r«ft of his Letters to an* 
Country. That the ]S4imfters of the Highlands and fwcr the foolifli Pretences of the Pretenaers bcinrf 
North gave in large Lifts of them to the Commit- a Proteftant and that he \vill govern Us according 
tee of the General Aiiembly, to be laid before the to Law. He fays, that being bred up in the Rcli- 
Pfivj-CounciL gion and Politicks niFT/ince. he is by Education a 

FACSIMILE OF THE EARLIEST SUCCESSFUL NEWSPAPER IN AMERICA 

by the leeches and then, after the loss of two quarts of blood, was 
"dosed to nausea and blistered to rawness." Even Washington's 
stout constitution could not stand this heroic treatment. His secre- 
tary, Tobias Lear, wrote sadly, ''Every medical assistance was 
offered, but without the desired result." 

70. Printing Presses and Newspapers. In 1638 the first font 
of type was brought from England, and in 1640 the Book of Psalms 
in meter (the old "Bay Psalm Book") was printed in Boston, — 
the first book printed in America north of the city of Mexico. On 
September 26, 1690, the first newspaper in America, Publick Occur- 
rences both Foreign and Domestic, appeared in Boston ; but it was 
promptly suppressed by the government "under high resentment." 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES 67 

However, in 1704 the Boston News-Letter had a kinder reception 
by the authorities, and became our first permanent newspaper. 
Within the next half century all the colonies except New Jersey, 
Delaware, and Georgia had Gazettes or Chronicles, and there were 
three or four respectable periodicals. But few books were produced 
in the colonies. The educated depended on England for their scien- 
tific works, and read with avidity the ponderous novels of the 
eighteenth century. The colonial presses were chiefly devoted to 
sermons and political '' broadsides." 

In 1734 a poor New York printer named Peter Zenger was tried 
for " seditious libel " in speaking freely of the government. He was 
defended by one of the ablest lawyers in the colonies, who offered 
his services gratis to "secure to ourselves and our posterity the 
liberty both of exposing and opposing arbitrary power by speaking 
and writing the truth." Zenger won his case, and the freedom of 
the press was thus early vindicated in our history. 

71. Hindrances and Helps to Union among the Colonies. 
The observant Swedish traveler Kalm, visiting America in ,1750, was 
astonished at the isolation of the colonies from one another, and 
it is said that the delegates who met from nine of them in a con- 
gress at New York fifteen years later regarded each other '' like am- 
bassadors from foreign nations, strange in face and action." It is 
not to be wondered at that the colonies knew little of one another 
in days when travel by stage, sloop, or saddle was laborious and 
expensive; nor that little love was lost between them when bound- 
aries were constantly in dispute on account of the reckless grants 
of the Stuart charters, and when jealousies were rife over the appro- 
priations of men and money for Indian defense. Yet, for all the 
diversity of type and disunion of sentiment in the colonies, there 
were some very fundamental bonds of union between them. They were 
all predominantly of English blood, with the inheritance of the 
English traditions of self-government. Popular assemblies insisted 
on the control of the public purse in every colony from New Hamp- 
shire to Georgia, often vexing the royal governors by doling out 
their salaries in niggardly fashion. The common law of England was 
universal. Trial by jury, liberty of speech and of the press, freedom 
from standing armies, absence of oppressive land taxes, — in short, 
Jhe rights and privileges for which free-born Englishmen had 



68 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

contended from the days of Magna Carta to the overthrow of the 
Stuarts, — were possessed and prized by all the colonies. And when 
these guarantees of liberty were invaded by a headstrong king and a 
heedless Parliament, the people of the colonies forgot that they were 
Virginians or New Englanders, Episcopalians or Puritans, planters, 
traders, farmers, or fishermen, in the prouder, deeper consciousness 
that they were freemen. 

References 

The Old Dominion : L. G. Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 
(Original Narratives of Early American History) ; John Fiske, Old Virginia 
and her Neighbors ; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, 
Vol. Ill, chap. V ; CM. Andrews, Colonial Self-Government (Am. Nation), 
chaps, xiii, xiv; Tyler, England in America (Am. Nation), chaps, iii-vi; 
Narratives of Early Virginia (Orig. Narr.) ; Mary Johnston, Pioneers of the 
Old South (Chronicles of America, Vol. V), chaps, i-viii, x-xiii, xv; E. M. 
Avery, History of the United States and its People, Vol. II, chaps, iii, ix; 
Edw. Channing, History of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 143-236; J. A. Doyle, 
English Colonies in America, Vol. I, chaps. vi-Lx. 

The New England Settlements : Channing, Vol. I, chaps, x-xv ; Vol. II, 
chaps, vi, vii; Fiske, The Beginnings of New England; Doyle, Vols. II and 
III ; Winsor, Vol. Ill, chaps, viii, ix ; Tyler (Am. Nation), chaps, ix-xix ; 
Andrews (Am. Nation), chaps, iii, iv, xvi, xvii; The Fathers of New England 
(Chronicles, Vol. VI); Narratives of the Insurrections (Orig. Narr.), pp. 165- 
297; W. T. Davis, Bradford's History of Plymouth (Orig. Narr.) ; J. K. Hos- 
MER, Winthrop's Journal (Orig. Narr.) ; Avery, Vol. II, chaps, v-viii, xv-xviii; 
A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. I, Nos. 90-149. 

The Proprietary Colonies: Doyle, Vol. I, chaps, x-xii; Vol. IV, chaps, 
i-vii ; J. F. Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland (Orig. Narr.) ; Fiske, 
Old Virginia and her Neighbors, chaps, viii, ix, xiii, xiv ; The Dutch and Quaker 
Colonies in America; Maud W. Goodwin, Dutch and English on the Hudson 
(Chronicles, Vol. VII) ; C. C. Hale, Narratives of Early Maryland (Orig. 
Narr.); Goodwin, Royce, and Putnam, Historic New York; A. S. Salley, Jr., 
Narratives of Early Carolina (Orig. Narr.); Andrews (Orig. Narr.), pp. 
31S-401; Sydney G. Fisher, The Quaker Colonies (Chronicles, Vol. VIII); 
Avery, Vol. II, chap, x; Vol. Ill, chaps, i, iii-vi; Channing, Vol. I, chaps, 
xvi-xviii ; Vol. II, chaps, ii, iv, xi, xii ; Tyler (Am. Nation) , chaps, vii, viii ; 
Andrews (Am. Nation), chaps, v-xii, xv-xix ; H. L. Osgood, The American 
Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II ; Hart, Vol. I, Nos. 153-172 ; 
Winsor, Vol. Ill, chaps, x-xiii ; Vol. V, chaps, iii-vi. 

The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century : Doyle, Vol. V ; E. B. Greene, 
Provincial America (Am. Nation), chaps, i-vi, xi-xviii; R. G. Thwaites, The 
Colonies, pp. 265 ff.; Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 1-108; Channing, Vol. II, chaps, 
xiii-xvii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, chap, ii; Andrews, Colonial 
Folkways (Chronicles, Vol. IX); The Colonial Period (Home University 



THE ENGLISH COLONIES " 69 

Library); W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England; 
P. A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia ; E. L. Bogart, Economic History 
of the United States, chaps, iii-vi ; Carl Becker, The Beginnings of the 
American People (Riverside History), chaps, iv, v ; G. L. Beer, The Com- 
mercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies, chaps, iv-viii. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. Bacon's Rebellion: Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. II, pp. 58-107 ; Hart, 
Vol. I, No. 70; Andrews (Am. Nation), pp. 215-231; Johnston, pp. 161-190; 
Avery, Vol. Ill, pp. 28-45 ; Osgood, Vol. Ill, pp. 258-278. 

2. The Pilgrims in England and Holland: M. Dexter, The Story of the 
Pilgrims, pp. 1-150 ; Channing, Vol. I, pp. 293-304 ; Hart, Vol. I, Nos. 49, 
55, 97-104 ; W. E. Griffis, The Pilgrims in their Three Homes. 

3. Dutch New York : Winsor, Vol. IV, pp. 395-409 ; Channing, Vol. I, 
pp. 438-483 ; Hart, Vol. I, Nos. 150-155 ; Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies, 
Vol. I, pp. 158-188. 

4. William Penn: Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies, Vol. II, pp. 109-139; 
WiNSOR, Vol. Ill, pp. 469-495 ; Channing, Vol. II, pp. 94-126 ; Doyle, Vol. IV, 
pp. 379-403 ; Old South Leaflets, Nos. 95, 171. 

5. Religion in New England: Winsor, Vol. II, pp. 219-244; Doyle, 
Vol. II, pp. 85-120; Vol. V, pp. 166-193; Osgood, Vol. I, pp. 200-211; Old 
South Leaflets, No. 55. 



CHAPTER III 
THE STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 

The Rise of New France 

72. European Claims in America in the Seventeenth Century. 
Three centuries ago the kings of Europe regarded as their own pri- 
vate property any distant lands or islands that mariners in their 
service might discover ; and they granted these lands to settlers and 
trading companies with little regard for each other's claims. Im- 
mense tracts of land in America, extending from sea to sea, were 
given away by the Stuart kings, on the ground that John Cabot's 
discovery of the mainland of America in 1497 g^^ve the New World 
to England. The States-General (parliament) of the Netherlands in 
162 1 granted to the Dutch West India Company exclusive privi- 
leges of trade '^on the east coast of America from Newfoundland 
to the Strait of Magellan." Seven years later Richelieu, the powerful 
cardinal-minister who ruled the ruler of France, granted to the 
'^ Hundred Associates of Canada territory and trading rights, ex- 
tending along the Atlantic coast from Florida to the Arctic circle." 
Even Sweden entered the ranks of the world-colonizing powers in 
1632, with a charter to a company ''for trade and settlement on the 
coasts of America, Africa, and Asia." The Swedes maintained their- 
tiny posts on the Delaware River for less than twenty years, and the 
Dutch held the banks of the Hudson for about fifty years. Besides 
the English, only the French and Spanish came anywhere near mak- 
ing good, by settlement or exploration, their vast claims to ter- 
ritory in North America. With the French the English had to fight 
for the possession of the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, 
and the Mississippi Rivers. 

73. Early French Explorers. The French were early in the 
field of American exploration. Their traditions tell of the discovery 
of distant western shores by sailors of Dieppe more than a century 
before Columbus's birth. At any rate, the fishing vessels of the 

70 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 71 

Norman and Breton sea dogs were looming through the Newfound- 
land fogs soon after Columbus's death ; and Verrazano had sailed 
the Atlantic coast from Florida to Nova Scotia for the French king 
sixty years before Sir Walter Raleigh opened the epoch of English 
settlement in Virginia. A long list of French names represent settle- 
ments attempted in Brazil, Carolina, Newfoundland, and Nova 
Scotia (Acadia) during the sixteenth century ; but the only real 
discoverer among these French adventurers was Jacques Cartier, of 
St. Malo in Brittany. 

74. Cartier on the St. Lawrence. In 1534 Cartier sailed into 
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and on his next voyage (1535) discovered 
the broad mouth of the river. He made his way up the St. Lawrence, 
stopping to barter for furs at Indian villages on the magnificent 
sites where the cities of Quebec and Montreal now stand (see map, 
p. 23). Just beyond Montreal the way to the China Sea (the hope 
held out by every westward-reaching river or creek) was barred by 
the rapids whose name, Lachine ("China"), still tells of Cartier's 
disappointment in not reaching the East Indies, For several years 
Cartier labored in vain to establish a colony on the St. Lawrence, and 
one year his men actually wintered there. But the noble river of 
Canada was destined, like the lowlands of Virginia, to wait until the 
opening of a new century before its savage tribes were disturbed by 
the permanent presence of Europeans. 

75. Champlain, the "Father of New France." The man who 
founded the French empire in Canada was Samuel de Champlain. 
Trained navigator, scientific student, intrepid explorer, earnest mis- 
sionary, unwearied advocate of French expansion in the New World, 
Champlain established a trading post on the mighty rock of Quebec 
in 1608. The little colony, like the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth 
twelve years later, barely survived its first winter. But an unfortu- 
nate circumstance in the summer of 1609 proved more disastrous to 
the French rule in America than many starving winters. Champlain 
was induced by the Algonquin Indians along the river to join them 
in an attack on their old enemies, the Iroquois, whose confederation 
of five powerful tribes stretched from the upper Hudson to Lake Erie. 
The expedition led Champlain's canoes into the sapphire waters of 
the Lake of the Iroquois, which now bears his name. A single 
volley from the French guns put to flight the astounded Indians 



72 



THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 



gathered on the shore of the lake ; but Champlain little dreamed 
of the far-reaching effect of those few shots that startled the virgin 
forest of the Lake of the Iroquois. On that very July day of 1609 
Henry Hudson was off the New England coast on his way to dis- 
cover the river which was to take him up to within a few miles of 
the lake. The defeat of the Iroquois by Champlain made that 
powerful league of tribes the allies of the Dutch (and later of the 



■ HUDSON 







JOLIET'S map of new FRANCE (fROM WINSOR'S " CARTIER 

TO FRONTENAC") 



English) on the Hudson, and not of the French on the St. Lawrence. 
They massacred the French missionaries and exterminated the tribes 
that listened to their preaching. Their enmity forced the French ex- 
plorers and traders to seek the interior of America by routes to the 
north of the Great Lakes. 

76. French Ideas of Colonization. Had the French controlled 
the Ohio valley and the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario 
(as they might have done with the Iroquois as allies), it is ex- 
tremely likely that they would have succeeded in their long struggle 
to confine the English within the narrow strip of land between the 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 73 

Allegheny Mountains and the Atlantic. Then the vast continent of 
America above the Gulf of Mexico would have developed under 
French instead of English institutions. What the French ideas of 
colonization were we see in the regulations made by Richelieu in 
1627 to 1628 for the Hundred Associates of New France, and by the 
ministers of Louis XIV, when the colony became a province of the 
crown in 1663. None but Frenchmen and Roman Catholics were 
allowed in the colony. The land was all in the hands of great pro- 
prietors, who rented strips for cultivation along the river banks in 
exchange for labor on their big estates or payment in produce. The 
government was administered by the officers of the company or the 
crown, without the direction or even the advice of any representative 
assembly. There was no local government. Justice was dispensed 
by the magistrates without trial by jury. In place of the self-rule 
enjoyed by the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard there 
prevailed in Canada the system known as " paternalism," which treated 
the inhabitants of the colony like irresponsible children under the firm, 
paternal hand of its governors. They were directed by the government 
not only what taxes to pay, with what ports to trade, what laws to 
obey, what worship to perform, but what tools to use, what seeds to 
plant, at what age to marry, and how large families to bring up. This 
absolute and paternal rule, while it promoted military efficiency, did 
not attract colonists. During the seventeenth century the English 
population along the Atlantic coast grew to four hundred thousand, 
while the French in Canada barely reached eighteen thousand. The 
three chief posts of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal were strung 
along the St. Lawrence at intervals of ninety miles. The sparseness 
of population permitted agriculture to be carried on only in the 
neighborhood of the forts which served to protect the settlers from 
the Indians. 

77. Coureurs de Bois and Missionaries. Westward through the 
St. Lawrence valley and along the shores of the Great Lakes roamed 
the hunters and trappers and fur traders, the wood-rangers {coureurs 
de bois) who defied the trading laws of the king's governor at 
Quebec. These wild Frenchmen often sacrificed their native tongue, 
their religion, even their very civilization itself, and joined the 
aboriginal American tribes, marrying Indian squaws, eating boiled 
dog and mush, daubing their naked bodies with greasy war paint; 



74 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH " 

and leading the hideous dance or the murderous raid. Missionaries, 
chiefly of the Jesuit order, penetrated the wilderness of Canada to 
convert the Indians to Christianity. In 1643 they were the pioneers 
to the savage lands of the Hurons about Georgian Bay, and during 
the whole of the seventeenth century they kept side by side with 
the explorer and the trader in their march westward. They have left 
us an account of their triumphs and martyrdoms in a series of annual 
reports sent home to the superior of their order in France during 
the years 1632 to 1675. These reports, called the ^'Jesuit Relations," 
have been edited in over seventy volumes by an American historian. 
Professor R. G. Thwaites. They form one of the most valuable 
sources for the study of the French in America. 

78. French Explorers on the Great Lakes. Champlain had 
advocated westward expansion. He discovered Lake Ontario and 
Georgian Bay and explored the Ottawa valley. In 1634 he sent Jean 
Nicolet as far as the outlet of Lake Superior. A generation of ex- 
plorers and traders followed in Nicolet's footsteps, penetrating the 
western wilderness to the upper waters of the Mississippi and even 
reaching the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. In 1671 St. Lusson, 
standing at Sault Ste. Marie, where the emerald flood of Lake Su- 
perior rushes to join the darker waters of Lake Huron, took posses- 
sion, with great pomp and pageant, of the vast Northwest for his 
sovereign king, Louis XIV. 

79. La Salle opens the Mississippi Valley. Already Robert 
Cavelier, the Sieur de la Salle, who was to repeat St. Lusson's cere- 
mony eleven years later at the mouth of the Mississippi and so 
complete the dominion of France from the Lakes to the Gulf of 
Mexico, was pushing his way down the Ohio valley to reach the 
" Big Water " {Mich sipi) which the Indians said flowed southward 
for innumerable days. La Salle was a French nobleman, cultured, 
aristocratic, domineering; yet he sacrificed wealth and ease, bore 
with marvelous patience repeated and overwhelming misfortunes, 
endured physical hardship and forest travel which exhausted even 
his Indian guides, that he might accomplish his single purpose of 
extending the name and power of France in the New World. He 
labored twelve years in the face of jealousy and detraction at home, 
treachery in his own ranks, bankruptcy, shipwreck, and massacre, 
before he actually guided his canoes out of the Illinois into the 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 75 

long-Hesired stream of the Mississippi (February 6, 1682). The 
Jesui: priest Marquette and the trader Joliet had anticipated him by 
nine years, saiHng down the great river as far as the mouth of the 
Arkansas, but returning when they had satisfied themselves that the 
river flowed into the Gulf 
of Mexico instead of the 
western sea. La Salle, how- 
ever, was stimulated by a 
greater purpose than the 
discovery of a passage to 
China. He was adding a 
continent to the dominion 
of France. He planted the 
lilies of France on the 
shores of the Gulf of Mex- 
ico (April 9, 1682), naming 
the huge valley of the Mis- 
sissippi ' ''Louisiana" in 
honor of his sovereign, 
Louis XIV. 

80. The Builders of 
New France. La Salle him- 
self did not live to develop 
and govern the new domain 
of Louisiana.^ But the line 
of posts down the Illinois 
and the Mississippi, which 
united the French pos- 
sessions in Canada and 

Louisiana; the fortification of Detroit (1701), with its control of 
Lake Erie and the portages to the Ohio tributaries ; the pros- 
perous colony of seven thousand inhabitants in the lower Mis- 
sissippi Valley, which grew up with New Orleans (founded, 17 18) 
as its capital, — all were the outcome of La Salle's vast labors. 




LA SALLE AT THE MOUTH OF THE 
MISSISSIPPI 



1 Returning to the New World from a visit to France, La Salle missed the mouth of the 
Mississippi and landed, perilously near being shipwrecked, on the Texan coast by Matagorda. 
He was treacherously assassinated by some of his own party while trying to reach Louisiana 
through swamp and jungle in 1687. 




™™CH EXPLORATIONS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTMV ABOUT THE 
GREAT LAKES AND THE MISSISSIPPI 



STJCUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 77 

If Champlain was the father of New France, La Salle was its 
elder brother. These two, together with the energetic, farseeing 
governor of Canada, the Count Frontenac (1672-1682, reappointed 
1 689-1 698), form the trio who created the French power in the New 
World, and whose plan of empire building, had it not been thwarted 
by the narrow and bigoted policy of the court of Versailles, might 
have made not only the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys but all 
of America above the tropics an enduring colony of France. 

81. How the English Colonies viewed French Expansion. 
The English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, occupied with their 
own problems of developing their agricultural resources, building 
up their commerce, defending their precious rights of self-government 
against king and proprietor, were slow to realize the serious meaning 
of the French power which was gradually surrounding them in a 
long chain of posts from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth 
of the Mississippi. Though by their charters several of the colonies 
extended to the Pacific, the Allegheny Mountains, only a few score 
miles from the Atlantic coast, actually formed a western boundary 
which the colonists were over a century in reaching and another 
half century in crossing. When the Virginians were still defending 
their tide-swept peninsulas against the Susquehannock Indians, and 
the Carolinians were laying the foundations of their first city, what 
the French fur traders, missionaries, and explorers were doing at the 
head of the Great Lakes or along the Mississippi seemed too remote 
for notice. Only in Acadia (Nova Scotia), where the French had 
established their first permanent settlement, in 1604, and in the 
region of Hudson Bay, were there actual rivalry and armed conflict 
between French and English. 

82. The Critical Situation of New York. New York differed 
from the other English colonies in this important respect : it 
was the only one not protected in the rear by the wall of the 
Alleghenies, and hence the only one that had direct and easy 
communication with the Iroquois south of the Great Lakes and with 
the French on the St. Lawrence. Furthermore, only the year before 
the Duke of York's fleet took New Netherland from the Dutch, 
Louis XIV, just come of age, had taken the colony of New France 
into his own hands (1663). His able minister, Colbert, reorganized 
the government, securing bounties for trade and large loans and gifts 



78 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH " 

of money and stores from the king for the French colonies in Canada, 
the West Indies, South America, and Africa. A royal governor was 
sent to Canada, together with a military commander and a regiment 
of twelve hundred veterans of the European wars. The French 
frontier was pushed down to Lake Champlain, and the new governor 
was on his way south with five hundred men to chastise the Iroquois 
when he heard that the English had seized the Hudson. He "re- 
turned in great sylence and dilligence toward Canada, declaring that 
the king of England did grasp at all America." Still the commander 
wrote home to Colbert that it was necessary for the French to have 
New York. It would give them an ice-free entrance to Canada by 
the Hudson valley, would break up the English alliance with the 
Iroquois, and would divide the English colonies in America into a 
northern and a southern group. Under these circumstances it was 
not strange that New York should be the colony most concerned 
about the growth of the French power, and that it should be Dongan, 
the Duke of York's governor, who first urged upon his countrymen 
that to have the French " running all along from our lakes by the 
back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico" might be 
"very inconvenient to the English" (1683). 

83. The Opening of a Century of Warfare with France. So 
long as the Stuarts occupied the English throne, however, their 
governors in New York or in any other American colony received 
little support against the French. The royal brothers Charles II 
and James II, who basely accepted millions of pounds from their 
cousin Louis XIV of France to combat their own parliaments in 
England, could not with very good grace attack King Louis's gover- 
nors in America. But with the expulsion of the Stuarts and the 
accession of William of Orange to the English . throne, in 1689, a 
great change came. William had for years been the deadly enemy 
of Louis XIV on account of the latter's shameful attack on the 
Netherlands in 1672.^ Moreover, William, as the leading Protestant 
prince of Europe, was the champion of the reformed religion, which 
Louis was attempting to overthrow. England rallied to William's 
support against the absolute power of France. A mighty struggle 

1 William of Orange, when he was invited to the English throne in 1688, was serving his 
seventeenth year as Stadtholder (or President) of the Dutch Republic, the northern provinces 
of the Netherlands. 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 79 

began between the two countries for the colonial and commercial 
supremacy of the world. In the century and a quarter that inter- 
vened between William's accession to the English throne and the 
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), England and France fought 
seven wars, filling sixty years and covering lands and oceans from 
the forests of western Pennsylvania to the jungles of India, and 
from the Caribbean Sea to the mouth of the Nile. 



The Fall of New France 

84. Indian Attacks on the English Frontiers. Louis XIV's 
governor in Canada, the wily old Count Frontenac, was only waiting 
for an excuse to attack the English settlements in New England and 
New York. On learning of the outbreak of war between France and 
England (1689) he sent his bands of Indian allies against the 
frontier towns to pillage, burn, and massacre. Dover, in the present 
state of New Hampshire, and Schenectady, in the Mohawk valley. 
New York, were the scenes of frightful Indian atrocities. Even 
the conclusion of peace between the courts of London and Paris 
in 1697, and the death of Frontenac in the next year, brought only 
a lull in these savage raids. 

85. The Treaty of Utrecht. In 1701 a new war broke out be- 
tween the two great rival powers. Louis XIV, in defiance of all 
Europe, set his grandson on the vacant throne of Madrid, thinking 
by the combined strength of France and Spain to crush out Protes- 
tantism entirely, to control the wealth of the New World, and to de- 
stroy England's colonial empire and sweep her fleets from the ocean. 
The French king failed in his ambitious plans. After repeated de- 
feats at the hands of Queen Anne's great general, the duke of 
Marlborough,^ he was forced to conclude the humiliating Treaty of 
Utrecht (1713), which made England the foremost maritime power 
of the world. By the clauses of the treaty that referred to the 
New World, France surrendered to England the territories of Acadia 
(Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay. Statesmen in 
America urged that England should demand the whole St. Lawrence 

1 King William III died in 1702 and was succeeded by his sister-in-law, Anne, a Prot- 
estant daughter of James II. With England in this War of the Spanish Succession were 
allied the Netherlands, Savoy, and the Holy Roman Empire. 



8o THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

valley and free the colonies once for all from the danger of the 
French and Indians on the north. But the mother country was con- 
tent for the moment to get a clear title to regions which had been 
in dispute for a hundred years and to secure the undisputed control 
of the Iroquois tribes in western New York. The French were des- 
tined to hold the great rivers of Canada for half a century more. 

86. The Truce under Walpole and Fleuri. The Treaty of 
Utrecht was only a truce, after all, as far as America was concerned, 
for it decided nothing as to the possession of the vast territory west 
of the Alleghenies. But the truce was kept for many years on ac- 
count of the death of the ambitious Louis XIV (171 5) and the rise 
to power of the peacefully disposed ministers, Robert Walpole in 
England and Cardinal Fleuri in France. Till the middle of the 
eighteenth century, though Indian raids on the frontiers, promoted 
by the French, occurred at frequent intervals, only one real French 
war (King George's War, 1 744-1 748) disturbed the colonies.^ A 
glorious exploit of the colonial troops in this war was the capture in 
1745 of the imposing fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, 
guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Colonel William Pepperrell 
of Maine was in command of the expedition, and his army con- 
sisted almost wholly of 4000 troops voted by the New England legis- 
latures. The restoration of the fortress to France in the peace of 
1748 created bitter feeling in the breasts of the New England yeo- 
men, who thought that the mother country under-rated their sacri- 
fices and courage. 

87. The English Colonies wake to the Danger from the French. 
During the first half of the eighteenth century the English colonies 
grew more and more alive to the serious menace of the French 
occupation of the land beyond the mountains. The danger, which 
in the seventeenth century had seemed to threaten only the New 
England and the New York frontiers, extended to the Far South 
when the French governors of Louisiana warned English sailors away 
from the mouth of the Mississippi (1699) and the Spaniards insti- 
gated the Cherokee and Yamassee Indians against the Carolinas 

1 The names and dates of the actual French wars from the accession of William III to 
the middle of the eighteenth century were King William's War (i 689-1 697), Queen Anne's 
War (1702-1713), and King George's War (1744-1748). They were all parts of general 
European conflicts (see Robinson and Beard. Development of Modem Europe, Vol. I, 
PP- 28-33, 42-44! 60-68). 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 8i 



(1702). From Acadia to Florida came voices of .entreaty to the 
English court. Governor Bellomont of New York urged the estab- 
lishment of a line of posts along the northern frontier, since "to 
pursue the Indians again and again to the forests was as useless 
as chasing birds." From Governor Keith of Pennsylvania came the 
request (1721) 'Ho fortify the passes on the back of Virginia," 
and build forts on the Lakes ''to 
interrupt the French." Governor 
Burnet of New York actually forti- 
fied Oswego on Lake Ontario at his 
own expense (1727). A few years 
earlier Spotswood, the gallant gov- 
ernor of Virginia, had led a party 
of riders to the crest of the Blue 
Ridge, where, overlooking the beau- 
tiful Shenandoah valley, they 
drank the healths of the king and 
the royal household in costly wines 
and " fired a volley " after each 
bumper. From the Carolinas came 
anxious complaints about the new 
and growing colony of "Luciana 
[Louisiana] in Mississippi." And 
soon afterwards Oglethorpe's col- 
ony of Georgia was planted as a 
buffer state against the Spaniards 
in Florida and the French in the 
West Indies. 

88. The Rivalry in the Ohio 
Valley. The French too were 
active. They built forts at Crown 

Point and Niagara, put armed vessels on Lake Champlain, occupied 
Detroit for the control of Lake Erie and the portages to the Ohio 
streams, increased their posts along the Mississippi, and pushed for- 
ward the settlement of Louisiana. Both sides were waiting for the 
event which was to strike the spark of war. That event came when 
the French and the English at the same moment moved to seize the 
Ohio valley, — the French hoping to pen up the English colonies in 




ONE OF CELERON DE BIENVILLE'S 

LEAD PLATES, FOUND ON THE 

BANKS OF THE OHIO 



82 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

the narrow strip of land east of the Alleghenies ; the English to 
get elbowroom beyond the mountains and control the routes to the 
Mississippi. As Celeron de Bienville dropped down the Ohio (1749), 
nailing signs to the trees and burying lead plates by the river banks, 
proclaiming the land to be the domain of Louis XV of France, and 
Christopher Gist followed in his track (1750), selecting sites for 
the settlements of the Ohio Company of Virginia, they were the 
advance heralds of the struggle between France and England, not 
only for the valley of the Ohio but for the possession of the continent 
of North America. 

89. Comparison of the French and English Colonies. The two 
powers brought thus face to face to contend for the mastery of 
America differed from each other in every respect. The one was 
Roman Catholic in religion, absolute in government, a people of 
magnificent but impracticable colonial enterprises ; the other a 
Protestant, self-governing people, strongly attached to their homes, 
steadily developing compact communities. There was not a printing 
press or a public school in Canada, and plow and harrow were rarer 
than canoe and musket. The 80,000 inhabitants of New France were 
overwhelmingly outnumbered by the 1,300,000 English colonists. 
But two facts compensated the French for their inferiority in num- 
bers: first, by their fortified positions along the St. Lawrence and 
the Great Lakes and at the head of the Ohio valley, they compelled 
the English, if they wished to pass the Alleghenies, to fight on French 
ground ; secondly, the imified absolute government of New France 
enabled her to move all her forces quickly under a single command, 
whereas the English colonies, acting, as Governor Shirley of Massa- 
chusetts complained, "like discordant semirepublics," either insisted 
on dictating the disposition and command of the troops which they 
furnished, or long refused, like New Jersey and the colonies south 
of Virginia, to furnish any troops at all. To make matters worse, 
the generals sent over from England, with few exceptions, despised 
the colonial troops and snubbed their officers. 

90. The Albany Plan of Colonial Union. Farseeing men like 
Governors Dinwiddie of Virginia and Shirley of Massachusetts tried 
to effect some sort of union of the colonies in the face of the im- 
minent danger from the French. The very summer that the first 
shots of the war were fired (1754) a congress was sitting at Albany 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 83 

for the discussion of better intercolonial relations and the cementing 
of the Iroquois alliance. At that congress Benjamin Franklin, the 
foremost man in the colonies, proposed the scheme of union known 
as the Albany Plan. A grand council consisting of representatives 
from each colony was to meet annually to regulate Indian affairs, 
maintain a colonial army, control public lands, pass laws affecting 
the general good of the colonies, and levy taxes for the expenses of 
common undertakings. A president general chosen by the king was 
to have the executive powers of appointing high officials and of 
nominating the military commanders. He might also veto the acts 
of the council. Franklin's wise plan, however, found favor neither 
with the colonial legislatures nor with the royal governors. To 
each of them it seemed a sacrifice of their rightful authority ; so the 
colonies were left without a central directing power, to cooperate or 
not with the king's officers, as selfish interests prompted. 

91. George Washington opens the Great French War. The 
opening act of the contest for the Ohio valley is of special interest 
as introducing George Washington on the stage of American history. 
When the French began to construct a chain of forts to connect 
Lake Erie with the Ohio River, Governor Dinwiddle of Virginia sent 
Washington, a major in the Virginia militia, thoroughly familiar 
with the hardships of forest travel, to warn the French off of territory 
"so notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great 
Britain." Washington faithfully delivered his message to the French 
commanders at Venango and Fort Le Boeuf in the wilds of north- 
western Pennsylvania and was sent again the next year (1754) to 
anticipate the French in seizing the important position where the 
Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio. He clashed 
with a 'detachment of French and Indians at Great Meadows, and 
there the first shot was fired in the great war which was to disturb 
three continents.^ The French had secured the " forks of the Ohio " 
with a strong fort (Duquesne), but Washington erected Fort Neces- 
sity close by to assert the claims of England to the region. His 

1 This war, called in Europe the Seven Years' War and in America the French and Indian 
War, was the most tremendous conflict of the eighteenth century. In Europe it assumed 
the form of a huge coalition of France, Austria, Spain, Russia, and minor countries against 
Frederick the Great of Prussia. England was Frederick's ally, and the war brought her into 
conflict with France for colonial supremacy in India and America (see Robinson and Beard, 
Development of Modem Europe, Vol, I, pp. 68, 71). 




M 



< 
i-i 

Q 

Q 

< 

u 

O 

I 



86 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

garrison was not strong enough, however, to hold the fort, and he 
was forced to surrender on the Fourth of July, — a day which through 
his own devotion and courage, a quarter of a century later, was to 
become forever glorious in our history. 

92. Braddock's Defeat. The war that opened with the skirmish 
at Great Meadows in 1754 went badly for the English in the early 
years. The first regular British troops sent over, under the command 
of the brave but rash General Braddock, to take Fort Duquesne, 
were surprised and almost annihilated in the Pennsylvania forests 
(July, 1755). Their French and Indian opponents fought behind 
rocks, trees, and bushes, in a kind of warfare utterly strange to the 
European veterans, who were used to beaten roads and wide fields 
of battle. In the awful confusion Braddock fell with nearly a thou- 
sand of his soldiers. It was only the gallant conduct of the young 
Washington, whose horse was shot under him twice and whose 
uniform was pierced with bullets, that saved the retreat from utter 
rout and panic. 

93. William Pitt and the Turn of the War. Braddock's defeat 
exposed the whole line of frontier settlements from Pennsylvania to 
South Carolina to the savage raids of the Indians ; while his papers, 
falling into the hands of the French, revealed and frustrated the 
whole plan of the English attack on Niagara and the forts of Lake 
Champlain. A frightful massacre of English prisoners at Fort Wil- 
liam Henry on Lake George, by the Indian allies of the French, 
added to the miseries of the year 1757. That same year, however, 
William Pitt, the greatest English statesman of the eighteenth 
century and the greatest war minister in all England's history, came 
into power. Pitt was incorruptible and indefatigable, full of con- 
fidence in England's destiny as the supreme world power. He 
immediately infused new life into the British armies, and fleets 
spread over half the globe. Incompetent commanders were re- 
moved, discipline was stiffened, official thieving was stopped. An 
army of 22,000 Britishers was raised for the war in America, 
where the colonies, catching the infection of Pitt's tremendous 
energy, voted money and troops with lavish generosity. In all, 
about 50,000 troops were ready for the fourfold campaign of 
1758 against the forts of Louisburg, Ticonderoga, Duquesne, and 
Niagara. Except for a bad defeat at Ticonderoga, the British and 
colonial troops were successful. In 1758 Louisburg was recaptured, 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 87 

and Fort Duquesne was taken and rechristened Fort Pitt (Pitts- 
burgh) in honor of the incomparable war minister. The next year 
Niagara and the lake ports fell. 

94. The Fall of Quebec. Then came the crisis. Generals Wolfe 
and Amherst, the heroes of Louisburg, closed in upon the heart 
of New France, Wolfe leading 
a fleet up the St. Lawrence to 
attack Quebec, and Amherst 
approaching Montreal by the 
Hudson valley. After a sum- 
mer of excruciating physical 
pain and apparent military 
failure, Wolfe conceived and 
executed a brilliant strategic 
movement. On September 12, 
1759, under cover of a black 
midnight, he embarked about 
3500 picked men in small 
boats and with muffled oars 
dropped down the river past the 
French sentries to a deserted 
spot on the bank a little above 
the city. Before dawn his men, 
in single file, were clambering 
up the wooded path of a ravine 
in the precipitous bank to the 
heights above the river, where 
they easily overpowered the 
feeble guard. When morning 

broke, the astonished French commander. Marquis Montcalm, saw 
the red coats of the British, soldiers moving on the Plains of Abraham 



-\' 




Li. 






^i 



^ ^. 



vc« 









f^t^^'^^ 










■S^ae^^^r^T 






111. 



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THE WOLFE-MONTCALM MONUMENT ^ 



1 In the governor's garden in Quebec stands the monument dedicated to these two noble 
commanders. The inscription which it bears is perhaps the most beautiful expression of 
commemorative sentiment in the world : 

MORTEM VIRTUS COMMUNEM 

FAMAM HISTORIA 
MONUMENTUM POSTERITAS 

DEDIT. 
WOLFE MONTCALM 

(" Valor gave them a common death, history a common fame, and posterity a common 
monument.") 



88 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ENGLISH 

in front of the city and hastened to the attack. Few battles in history 
have had more important results than the British victory on the 
Plains of Abraham ; none has been invested with deeper pathos. The 
fall of Quebec was the doom of the French empire in America. But 
thoughts of victory and defeat are both lost in the common sacrifice 
of victor and vanquished on that day : Wolfe, young, brave, accom- 
plished, tender, dropping his head in the moment of victory on the 
breast where he wore the miniature of his ladylove in far-away 
England ; and the courteous, valorous Montcalm, turning a heart 
wrung with mortal pain and the anguish of defeat from the last long- 
ing for the chestnut groves of his beloved chateau in France to beg 
the new master of Canada to be the protector of its people, as he had 
been their father. 

95. The Peace of Paris. Amherst took Montreal in 1760, and 
in the next two years English fleets completed the downfall of 
France and her ally Spain by seizing the rich sugar islands of the 
West Indies and capturing Havana in Cuba and Manila in the 
Philippines. Peace was signed at Paris in 1763. By its terms 
France ceded to England all of Canada and the region east of the 
Mississippi (except the Island of New Orleans), retaining only the 
two insignificant islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (never to be 
fortified) on the coast of Newfoundland for drying their fish. To her 
ally Spain, France ceded New Orleans and the country west of the 
Mississippi. England gave back to France most of the islands of the 
West Indies ; and, while retaining Florida, restored Havana and 
Manila to Spain, under whose authority they were destined to remain 
until the Spanish- American War of 1898. 

96. Significance of the Peace of Paris. The Peace of Paris 
was of immense importance to France, England, and America. For 
France it meant (except for a brief revival in Napoleon's day) 
the abandonment of the idea of a colonial empire in North America. 
For England it marked the acme of colonial power and gave the 
promise of undisturbed empire in the New World. For Canada it 
meant the breaking of the unnatural alliance with savages and the 
eventual substitution of free institutions, trial by jury, religious 
toleration, and individual enterprise in place of the narrow, paternal 
absolutism of the Bourbons. Finally, for the American colonies it 
furnished the conditions for future greatness by removing the danger 
from organized Ipdian attack along the frontiers and opening the 



r, 

I 



STRUGGLE WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 89 

great territory west of the Alleghenies to the hardy pioneers and 
woodsmen who, from the crests of the mountains, were already gaz- 
ing into the promised land. 

References 

The Rise of New France : W. L. Grant, The Voyages of Samuel de 
Champlain (Original Narratives of Early American History) ; Francis Park- 
man, The Pioneers of France in the New World; La Salle and the Discovery 
of the Great West; The Old Regime in Canada; Justin Winsor, Narrative 
and Critical History of America, Vol. IV, chaps, iii-vii; C artier to Frontenac; 
R. G. Thwaites, France in America (American Nation Series), chaps, i-v ; Wm. 
B. MuNRO, Crusaders of New France (Chronicles, Vol. IV) ; Stephen Leacock, 
The Dawn of Canadian History; Canada and its Provinces, Vol. I, New 
France, sects, i-iv; Vol. II; James Douglas, Old France in the New World; 
J. H. FiNLEY, The French in the Heart of America, chaps, i-ix; E. M. Avery, 
Histo'ry of the United States and its People, Vol. II, chap, i; Vol. Ill, chaps, ix, 
xxii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII, chap. iii. 

The Fall of New France : Parkman, A Half Century of Conflict; Mont- 
calm and Wolfe ; Thwaites, chaps, vi-xvii ; G. M. Wrong, The Conquest of 
New France (Chronicles, Vol. X); The Fall of Canada; Wm. Wood, The 
Passing of New France; Canada and its Provinces, Vol. I, New France, 
sects, vi, vii ; Avery, Vol. IV; Edw. Channing, History of the United States, 
Vol. II, chaps, xvii-xix ; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, 
Vol. V, chaps, vii, viii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, chap, iv; A. B. 
Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 117-129; 
John Fiske, Essays Historical and Literary, Vol. II, chap, iii; J. A. Doyle, 
English Colonies in America, Vol. V, chap. ix. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Albany Plan of Union: Old South Leaflets, No. 9; Thwaites, 
pp. 168-172 ; WooDROw Wilson, History of the American People, Vol. II, 
pp. 342-356. 

2. George Washington's Embassy to the French Forts: Parkman, 
Montcalm and Wolfe, Vol. I, pp. 128-161 ; Winsor, Vol. V, pp. 490-494 ; 
Thwaites, pp. 157-165; Old South Leaflets, No. 187; A. B. Hurlburt, 
Washington's Road (Historic Highways Series), pp. 85-119. 

3. The Removal of the Acadians: Parkman, A Half Century of Con- 
flict, Vol. I, pp. 183-203 ; Montcalm and Wolfe, Vol. I, pp. 234-285 ; Wrong, 
pp. 164-177 ; Avery, Vol. IV, pp. 93-112 ; Hart, Vol. II, No. 126 ; Winsor, 

. Vol. V, pp. 41S-418, 452-463- 

4. The French Explorers on the Great Lakes : Thwaites, pp. 34-48 ; 
Canada and its Provinces, Vol. I, pp. 43-108; Winsor, Vol. IV, pp. 163-196; 
Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp. 1-47. 

5. Paternal Government in Canada: Parkman, The Old Regime in 
Canada, pp. 257-281 ; Thwaites, pp. 124-143 ; Munro, pp. 139-154, 180-227 ; 
Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, pp. 79-87, 102-109. 



PART 11. SEPARATION OF THE 
COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

CHAPTER IV 

BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 

The Authority of Parliament in the Colonies 

97. Conflicting Opinions on the American Revolution. The 

curtain had hardly fallen on the first act of American history — 
the establishment and triumph of the English race in the New 
World — when it rose on a second act, short but intense ; namely, the 
American Revolution, which severed the colonies from England and 
admitted to the family of nations the new republic of the United 
States. This great event has too often been represented as the unani- 
mous uprising of a downtrodden people to repel the deliberate, un- 
provoked attack of a tyrant upon their liberties ; but when thousands 
of people in the colonies could agree with a noted lawyer of Massa- 
chusetts that the Revolution was a "causeless, wanton, wicked re- 
bellion," and thousands of people in England could applaud Pitt's 
denunciation of the war against America as '' barbarous, unjust, and 
diabolical," it is evident that, at the time at least, there were two 
opinions as to colonial rights and British oppression. We can rightly 
understand the American Revolution only by a study of British 
rule in the colonies. 

98. The "Immemorial Rights" of Englishmen. The first Eng- 
lish emigrants to these shores brought with them, by the terms of 
their charters, for themselves and their posterity, " the same liberties, 
franchises, immunities ... as if they had been abiding and born 
within this our realm of England or any other of our said dominions." 
Those liberties, for which their ancestors had been struggling for 
five hundred years, consisted in the right to protection of life and 
property, a fair trial and judgment by one's peers, participation in 

90 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 91 

local self-government, freedom of movement, occupation, and trade, 
and, above all, the privilege, through the representatives of the 
people in Parliament, to grant the king the moneys needed for 
foreign war and the support of the state. In many a contest for 
those rights with headstrong kings and cruel or worthless ministers 
of state, the English nobles and commoners had won the victory. 
The American colonists cherished these " immemorial rights of Eng- 
lishmen " with what Edmund Burke called a " fierce spirit of liberty." 
A goodly number of the colonists had come to these shores for the 
express purpose of enjoying political and religious liberty. They 
had created democratic governments in the New World, and the 
three thousand miles of ocean that rolled between them and the 
mother country necessarily increased their spirit of self-reliance. 
While acknowledging allegiance to the king of England, their actual 
relations with the English government were very slight. The attempt 
on the part of English ministers to make those relations closer re- 
vealed how far the colonies were separated from the mother country 
in spirit and led inevitably to their separation in fact. 

99. Causes of Conflict : the Navigation Acts. At the bottom 
of the misunderstanding between the colonies and the mother country 
were two developments in English history v/hich took place mainly 
in the eighteenth century. The first was the growth of the mercantile 
theory of trade. We have already noted (p. 57) how this theory 
caused the European nations to regard their colonies as mere sources 
of profit, and how the English Navigation Acts were passed to con-, 
trol the trade of America. A striking example of the harm done to 
colonial trade by this restrictive policy is the famous Sugar and 
Molasses Act of 1733. Barbados, Jamaica, San Domingo, and other 
islands of the West Indies, belonging to England, France, Holland, 
and Spain, produced immense quantities of sugar. The entire acre- 
age of these islands was given over to sugar plantations, while all 
the necessities of life were imported. The American colonies, being 
near at hand, sent large supplies of fish, corn, wheat, flour, oil, soap, 
and lumber to the islands, and from this trade realized most of the 
money needed to pay the English manufacturers for goods imported 
from the mother country. Although the British West Indies alone 
did not begin to offer a sufficient market for the varied products of 
the colonial mainland, yet, in order to drive their French, Dutch, 



92 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

and Spanish rivals out of business, the Enghsh sugar planters of 
Barbados and Jamaica secured from Parliament an act imposing 
heavy duties on sugar, molasses, and rum imported from foreign 
colonies into the British-American colonies. This act, if strictly en- 
forced, would have ruined the trade of New England and, by 
stripping the colonies of gold and silver, would have also deprived 
the manufacturers of Old England of their market in the New World. 

The colonies were naturally aggrieved at such treatment. In spite 
of the fact that some of their products, like tobacco, were given 
favored treatment in the English market, they resented being re- 
strained in their trade in order to make another part of the British 
Empire prosperous. Their sentiment was that expressed by a gover- 
nor of Massachusetts in Charles II 's time, when he was reproved for 
not enforcing the Navigation Acts : " The king can in reason do 
no less than let us enjoy our liberties and trade, for we have made 
this large plantation (colony) of our own charge, without any 
contribution from the crown." That a prosperous illicit trade 
flourished, and that English ministers like Walpole winked at the 
infringement of the Navigation Acts, was small comfort to the 
colonies. There the ugly laws stood on the statute book, and at 
any moment a minister might come into power who would think it 
good policy or his bounden duty to enforce them. 

100. The Relation of the Colonies to Parliament. The second 
disturbing element in the relation of England to the colonies was the 
question of the supremacy of Parliament. The American colonies had 
all been settled under charters granted not by Parliament but by the 
English kings. The colonial assemblies passed laws, levied taxes, voted 
supplies, and raised troops for their own defense, just like the Parlia- 
ment of England. They came to regard themselves, therefore, as 
filling the place of Parliament in America, and looked to the king 
as authority. But with the overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 the 
position of king and Parliament was reversed. The king himself 
became practically a subject of Parliament, whose authority and 
sovereignty grew continually stronger as the eighteenth century ad- 
vanced. The first kings of the Hanoverian dynasty, which suc- 
ceeded the Stuarts on the English throne, recognized this change. 
For example, in 1624 the Stuart James I had snubbed Parliament 
when it attempted to interfere in the affairs of Virginia, telling the 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 93 

House of Commons to attend to its own business and keep its hands 
off his domains; a century later (1720) the Hanoverian George I 
instructed his governor in Massachusetts to warn the inhabitants 
that in case of misbehavior their conduct would be brought to the 
notice of Parliament. Furthermore, Parliament extended the sphere 
of its interests in the colonies beyond the Acts of Trade, which had 
been its chief concern in the seventeenth century. It regulated the 
colonial currency, it made naturalization laws, it established a 
colonial post office. When the Stuart kings yielded to the power of 
Parliament, was it not useless for the colonies to plead the authority 
of their Stuart charters in opposition to that same Parliament ? 
Clearly, unless the colonies were aiming at independence — a charge 
which they indignantly denied up to the very outbreak of the Revo- 
lutionary War — they were subject to the sovereign power of Eng- 
land ; namely, the Parliament. 

101. Other Causes of Friction. During the first half of the 
I eighteenth century many colonial governors and high officials wished 
j to see the authority of Parliament established beyond question in 
the American colonies. Such measures as the abolition of the New 
England charters, the union of several colonies under a single gov- 
ernor, the imposition of a direct tax by Parliament, and even the 
\ creation of an American nobility were recommended. But so long 
as the practical, peace-loving Walpole and the ardent patriot Pitt 
held the reins of government in England, no such irritation of 
the colonial spirit of independence was attempted. There were 
enough causes of friction, as it was, between the colonies and the 
mother country. Incompetent and arbitrary governors were often 
appointed, who quarreled continually with the colonial assemblies 
over salaries, fees, and appointments. The crown, although it had 
ceased at the beginning of the eighteenth century to veto acts of 
Parliament, continued to veto acts of the colonial legislatures. These 
vetoes were sometimes prompted by the most selfish and unworthy 
motives, as when statutes of Virginia in restraint of the slave trade 
were annulled by the crown because of the heavy profits which the 
English courtiers were reaping from that infamous business. The 
J scornful treatment of colonial officers and troops by the British 
r regulars, in the French wars; the increasing severity of the Navi- 
gation Acts ; the persistent efforts of a group of high churchmen to 



94 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

'' establish the AngHcan Church and an Anglican bishop in America, — • 
all contributed to a spirit of wary self-defense and proud self- 
sufficiency, which observant men on both sides of the water said was 
developing into a desire for independence. 

102. Apprehensions of Colonial Revolt. Samuel Adams in his 
commencement oration of 1743 at Harvard College, in the presence 
of the royal governor of Massachusetts and his retinue, dared to 
discuss the question of "whether it was lawful to resist rulers in time" 
of oppression." The Swedish traveler Peter Kalm, who visited this 
country in 1 748-1 750, thought that the presence of the French in 
Canada was " the chief power that urged the colonies to submission." 
Many French statesmen comforted themselves for the loss of Canada 
by the thought that England ''would repent having removed the 
only check on her colonies," which would " shake off dependence the 
moment Canada was ceded." There were even British statesmen whO' 
urged that England should keep Guadeloupe, in the West Indies, at 
the peace of 1763, and leave the French undisturbed in Canada^ 
"in order to secure the dependence of the colonies on the mother 
country." 

The existence of such sentiment before the enactment of a single 
coercive measure by the British Parliament, or any specific act of 
rebellion on the part of the American colonies, shows what a sorry- 
business England had made of her colonial government in the 
eighteenth century and amply justifies the remark of Theodore 
Roosevelt, that the American Revolution was "a revolt against the 
whole mental attitude of 'Britain in regard to America, rather than, 
against any one special act or set of acts." 

Taxation without Representation 

103. Grenville revives the Navigation Acts. "Special acts and 
sets of acts," however, came in abundance after the peace of 
1763. Great Britain by her victories over the French in both 
hemispheres had become a great empire. But the cost had been 
great, too. The national debt had increased from £70,000,000 to 
£140,000,000. The British statesmen therefore began to devise plans 
for bringing the parts of the empire more closely together and mak- 
ing each contribute toward carrying the increased burden of colonial 



I 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 95 

administration. Early in 1764" George Grenville, prime mimstef 
of England, got through Parliament a series of measures for the 
control of the trade of the American colonies. The Navigation Acts, 
especially the odious Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733, with its amend- 
ments, were to be strictly enforced, and all commanders of British 
frigates in American waters were to have the right of acting as customs 
officers, employing the hated Writs of Assistance,^ or general warrants 
to search a man's premises for smuggled articles. The merchants of 
New England saw ruin staring them in the face if the Navigation 
Acts were enforced. Massachusetts alone had imported 15,000 hogs- 
heads of molasses^ from the French West Indies in 1763, and the 
hundreds of ships launched every year from the colonial yards were 
earning by their illegal foreign trade a large part of the millions 
which had to be paid yearly for imported British manufactured goods. 
104. Grenville proposes to tax the Americans. At the same 
time that the Navigation Acts were renewed Grenville gave notice 
that he intended to lay a tax on the colonies to help defray the 
expense of a small standing army in America. The proposal seemed 
reasonable and necessary, for at that very moment English troops 
west of the Alleghenies were engaged in the serious business of quell- 
ing an Indian uprising, headed by the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who, 
not accepting the peace of 1763, had united all the tribes from the 
mini to the Senecas in a last determined effort to keep the English 
out of the Ohio valley. Every cent of the money which the ministry 
proposed to raise in America was to be spent in America, and the 
-colonies were to be asked to contribute only about a third of the 
sum necessary. Furthermore, Grenville, who had absolutely no wish 
to oppress or offend the colonies, was willing to assess the tax in 
the way most acceptable to the Americans. He himself proposed 
a stamp tax, which required that all official and public documents, 
such as wills, deeds, mortgages, notes, newspapers, pamphlets, should 
be written on stamped paper or provided with stamps sold by the 
distributing agents of the British government ; but at the same time 
he invited the colonial agents in London and influential men in the 
colonies to suggest any other form of taxation which appeared to 

1 Against these writs the Boston lawyer James Otis had pleaded so vehemently three 
years earlier that John Adams called his speech the opening act of the American Revolution. 

2 Destined for the most part, unfortunately, to be made into rum for the African negro. 



96 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

them more suitable or acceptable,* and announced that no definite 
action in the matter would be taken for a year. 

105. Passage of the Stamp Act. No other plan was considered, 
and in March, 1765, the Stamp Act was passed with very little dis- 
cussion, in a half-filled Parliament, by a vote of 205 to 49. Dis- 
tributors of stamped paper were appointed for the colonies, Benjamin 
Franklin even soliciting the position in Pennsylvania for one of his 
friends. The British ministry anticipated no resistance to the act, 
which was to go into effect the first of November, 

106. Patrick Henry's Resolutions. How- 
ever, the Stamp Act met with an instant 
opposition in the colonies. A young lawyer 
named Patrick Henry rose from his seat in 
the Virginia House of Burgesses,^ and in an 
impassioned speech which drew from some 
members of the House the cry of " treason ! " 
presented and carried through the Assembly 
resolutions to the effect that " the General As- 
sembly of this colony . . . have in their repre- 
sentative capacity the only exclusive right and 
power to lay taxes and imposts upon the in- 
habitants of this colony ; and that every attempt to vest such 
power in any other person or persons ... is illegal, unconstitutional, 
and unjust, and has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well 
as American liberty." 

107. Resistance to the Stamp Act. Henry's speech and resolu- 
tions stirred up great excitement in the colonies. James Otis of 
Massachusetts suggested a general meeting of committees from all 
the colonies to protest against this new and dangerous assault on 
colonial liberties. A writer in the New York Gazette, under the 
name of "Freeman," went so far as to suggest separation from the 
British Empire. When the stamp distributors were appointed late 
in the summer, they became the immediate objects of obloquy and 
persecution throughout the colonies ; and before the first of Novem- 
ber every one of them had been persuaded or forced to resign. There 




i 



Ih SUTLlJlNGtiil 

iiiii'Miii)iiiiii>iiiiimi.ii.i>ii yiiii: 



A BRITISH STAMP 



1 Henry had been elected as a reward for his speech against the king's veto of a law 
of the Virginia Assembly fixing the salaries of the clergy in tobacco at a very low price — 
the famous " Parsons' Cause." 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 



97 



was rioting in every New England colony as well as in New York 
and Pennsylvania. In Boston the mob hanged the distributor, 
Oliver, in effigy, destroyed the building which he intended to use 
for his office, and shamefully wrecked the magnificent house of 
Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson,^ who, as chief justice of the prov- 
ince, had given the decision in favor of the legality of Writs of 
Assistance in 1761. 

108. The Stamp Act Congress. The congress suggested by Otis 
met at New York in October, with twenty-seven members from 

















THE FUNERAL PROCESSION OF THE STAMP ACT 

From an old print 



nine colonies. It published a '^ declaration of rights and grievances," 
denied the legality of any taxes but those levied by their assemblies, 
and sent separate addresses to the king and both Houses of Parlia- 
ment. These first state papers of the assembled colonies were dig- 
nified, able, cogent remonstrances against the disturbance of what 
they held to be sacred and long-enjoyed rights. 

109. Why America Resisted. The British Parliament had, by 
the Stamp Act, undoubtedly struck at the most precious right of 

1 Hutchinson's fine library was sacked and the books scattered in the street. The manu- 
script of his invaluable work on the History of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was rescued 
from the mud of the street. It is now in the historical museum in the Statehouse at Boston, 
the mud stains still visible on its rumpled edges. 



98 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

the colonists, that of voting their own taxes. The act seemed to the 
Americans to have reduced their assemblies to impotent bodies and 
made their charters void. The chief safeguard of their liberties, t^e 
control of the purse strings of the province, was gone. It was right for 
Parliament to regulate their foreign commerce, they said ; but taxes to 
men of English descent meant the free grant of money to the king 
by the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled. Their 
own colonial legislatures stood in the place of Parliament, since they 
had no part in the Parliament convened at Westminster. When the 
British statesmen argued that the colonies were 'Virtually repre- 
sented" in Parliament, because all members of the House of Com- 
mons represented all the British subjects except the nobles and the 
clergy, the colonists failed to follow the reasoning. For them a 
" representative " meant a man of their own town, county, or hundred, 
elected by their own votes. As well tell a Virginian that he was 
'^represented" in the ^assembly of New York as that he was 
represented in the British Parliament ! 

110. The Repeal of the Stamp Act. The violent and unexpected 
resistance to the Stamp Act in America woke in England some sense 
of the seriousness of the colonial problem. Grenville had been super- 
seded (July, 1765) as prime minister by the Marquis of Rocking- 
ham, a liberal Whig statesman, opposed to the coercion of the 
American colonies. The Rockingham ministry moved the repeal 
of the Stamp Act early in 1766, and on the fourth of March, after 
the fiercest battle of the century in the halls of Parliament, the 
motion was carried.^ The hated Stamp Act had been on the British 
statute book less than a year, and had been enforced in only a few 
American towns ; yet its repeal was hailed in the colonies by as joy- 
ful a demonstration as could have greeted the deliverance from ages 
of cruel oppression. The British ministers might have learned from 
both the passionate protests of 1765 and the profuse gratitude of 
1766 what a sensitive spirit of liberty they had to deal with in 
America. But less than a year after the repeal of the Stamp Act 
they began to set new mischief afoot. 

1 One of the reasons why the Whigs were more anxious than the Tories to conciliate the 
colonies was that the Whigs were the party of the great merchants, who feared their loss 
of trade if the Americans were driven by taxes to boycott British commerce through non- 
importation agreements. These merchants exerted considerable pressure on the House of 
Commons through delegations and petitions. 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 



99 



111. The Townshend Acts.* In July, 1766, the Rockingham 
ministry fell. William Pitt (Earl of Chatham), the creator of Eng- 
land's colonial empire and the stanch friend of America, formed a 
cabinet of men of various shades of opinion, in order to restore har- 
mony in the empire. But unfortunately Chatham himself, tormented 
by gout, retired to Bath, and the government was left without a 
firm guiding hand. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (or minister 
of finance) was Charles Townshend, a witty and persuasive orator, 
who was in favor of taxing America and 
had voted for the Stamp Act. Without 
the consent or even the knowledge of his 
fellow ministers, Townshend had the au- 
dacity, early in 1767, to introduce into 
Parliament new measures for raising 
revenue in America. Chatham was not 
there to protest, and the measures were 
carried. They provided that revenue 
cases in America should be tried in courts 
without a jury, declared Writs of As- 
sistance valid, released colonial judges and 
governors from dependence on their as- 
semblies for their salaries, provided for 
commissioners of customs to reside in 
the American ports, and, for the main- 
tenance of this "American establishment," levied rather heavy duties 
on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painter's colors imported into the 
colonies. 

112. Renewed Resistance of the Colonies. Again protest in 
America was immediate ; the British Parliament must not lay any 
taxes on the colonies to raise a revenue. The town meeting of 
Boston declared against importing any English goods under the new 
duties. The ardent Samuel Adams, after preparing an address to 
the British ministry, to Chatham, and to Rockingham, drew up a 
circular letter to the other colonies, which elicited expressions of 
sympathy from New Hampshire, Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, 
and South Carolina. The British minister for the colonies ordered 
the Massachusetts legislature to rescind the circular letter, as being 
of a ''dangerous and factious tendency," but the legislature flatly 




WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF 
CHATHAM 



100 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

refused by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen. Whereupon two regi- 
ments of British troops were sent from Halifax to Boston and landed 
under the protection of the guns of the warships which had brought 
them (September 28, 1768). Virginia stood side by side with Massa- 
chusetts in resisting the Townshend Acts. George Washington and 
Patrick Henry were prorninent in the adoption of resolutions by the 
Burgesses condemning the taxes and maintaining the right of the 
colonies to unite in petition to the crown. The boycott of English 
goods was effective, colonial importations falling off from £2,378,000 
in 1768 to £1,634,000 in 1769. The Townshend duties, instead of 
yielding the £40,000 a year that their author boasted to Parlia- 
ment they would, produced only some £16,000 during the three 
years they were in operation, a sum which it cost the government 
£200,000 to collect. 

113. The "Boston Massacre." But the total failure of the 
Townshend legislation to produce a revenue was not its worst effect. 
The presence of the British regiments in Boston was a constant 
source of chagrin to the inhabitants. On the fifth of March, 1770, 
the soldiers, irritated by jeering cries of " ruffians ! " and '' lobster- 
backs ! " fired into a crowd in King Street, killing five citizens and 
wounding several others. This " Boston Massacre " was the signal 
for the wildest excitement. A town meeting was called at once in 
Faneuil Hall, and Samuel Adams, proceeding as its delegate to the 
town house, demanded of acting Governor Hutchinson the immediate 
removal of both the regiments from the town. Hutchinson hesitated ; 
but Adams, rising to his full height and extending a threatening 
arm toward the governor, cried : " There are three thousand people 
yonder in the town meeting, and the country is rising ; night is 
coming on, and we must have our answer." The governor yielded. 

114. The Boston Tea Party. Meanwhile the storm of protests 
from the colonies and the fervent petitions of English merchants, 
who were being ruined by the American boycott, led Parliament to 
repeal the Townshend duties as it had the Stamp Act. In January, 
1770, Lord North became prime minister, and on the very day of 
the Boston Massacre moved to repeal all the duties except a trifling 
tax of threepence a pound on tea. King George III, in whose hands 
Lord North was a man of clay, insisted that the tax on tea be kept 
for the sake of asserting the right of Parliament to control the 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 



101 



colonies. The king thought that by a smart trick he could ensnare 
the colonies into buying the tea and paying the tax. He got his com- 
pliant Parliament to allow the East India Company a monopoly to sell 
its tea in America without paying the heavy English duty. Thus re- 
lieved of duties, the Company offered its tea to the colonists at a lower 




THE BOSTON MASSACRE 

From Paul Revere's engraving 



price, including the tax of threepence a pound, than they were paying 
for the same article smuggled from Holland. But the colonies were 
not to be bribed into an acknowledgment of the right of Parliament 
to levy even a threepenny tax. The cargoes of tea which the East 
India Company's ships brought over to American ports were rudely 
received. Philadelphia and New York refused to let the ships land. 
The authorities at Charleston held the tea in the customhouse, and 
later sold it. And in Boston, after vainly petitioning the governor 



102 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

to send the tea back to England, a committee of prominent citizens, 
disguised as American Indians, boarded the merchantmen on the 
evening of December i6, 1773, ripped open the chests of tea with 
their tomahawks, and dumped the costly contents into Boston Harbor. 

The Punishment of Massachusetts 

115, How Massachusetts irritated King George. The ^'Boston 
Tea Party" was the last straw. The colonies had added insult to 
disobedience. The outraged king called upon Parliament for severe 
measures of punishment. Massachusetts, and especially Boston, must 
be made an example of the king's vengeance to the rest of the 
colonies. The province was an old offender. As far back as 1646 the 
general court had assembled for the "discussion of the usurpation 
of Parliament," and a spirited member had declared that "if Eng- 
land should impose laws upon us we should lose the liberties of 
Englishmen indeed"; its attitude toward the Navigation Acts of 
Charles II has already been noticed (p. 92). Since the very first 
attempt of the British government after the French war to tighten 
its control of colonial commerce and raise a revenue in America, 
Massachusetts had taken the leading part in defiance. Letters, 
pamphlets, petitions, came in an uninterrupted stream from the 
Massachusetts " patriots," Hancock, Warren, Otis, and the Adamses. 
It was in Boston that the chief resistance to the Stamp Act had 
"been offered (1765) ; it was there also that the king had stationed 
his regiments of regulars (1768), and there that occurred the un- 
fortunate " massacre" of the fifth of March (1770) . " To George Ill's 
eyes the capital of Massachusetts was a center of vulgar sedi- 
tion, strewn with brickbats and broken glass, where his enemies 
went about clothed in homespun and his friends in tar and feathers." 

116. The "Intolerable Acts." When Parliament met in March, 
1774, it proceeded immediately to the passage of a number of acts 
to punish the province of Massachusetts. The port of Boston was 
closed to trade until the tea destroyed was paid for. Town meetings, 
those hotbeds of discussion and disobedience, were forbidden to 
convene without the governor's permission, except for the regular 
elections of officers. The public buildings designated by the governor 
were to be used as barracks for the troops. The king's officials, if 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 103 

indicted for certain capital crimes, might be sent to England for 
trial. Up to this time the British government had not passed any 
measure of punishment or revenge. The Grenville legislation and 
the Townshend Acts, however unwelcome to the colonies, had not 
been designed for their chastisement, but only for their better co- 
ordination with the other parts of the British Empire. Parliament 
had blundered into legislation and backed out of it, pursuing a policy 
of alternate encroachment and concession, — as Edmund Burke said, 
"seeking fresh principles of action with every fresh mail from 
America," and '' sneaking out of the difficulties into which they had 
so proudly strutted." But with the passage of the so-called Intol- 
erable Acts of 1774 this shifting policy was at an end. There were 
no more repeals by Parliament. King George's ''patience" was 
exhausted. 

117. The First Continental Congress. Expressions of sympathy 
now came to IVIassachusetts from all over the colonies. The Virginia 
Burgesses appointed the day on which the Intolerable Acts were to 
go into force as a day of fasting and prayer ; and when they were 
dismissed by their royal governor for showing sympathy with 
'' rebels," they promptly met again in the Raleigh tavern and pro- 
posed an annual congress of committees from all the colonies. The 
Virginia suggestion met with favor, and on September 5, 1774, the 
first Continental Congress met in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, 
''to consult on the present state of the colonies . . . and to de- 
liberate and determine upon wise and proper measures ... for the 
recovery and establishment of their just rights and liberties . . . 
and the restoration of union and harmony between Great Britain 
and the colonies, most ardently desired by all good men." All 
the colonies except Georgia were represented, and among that 
remarkable group of about half a hundred men were the leaders 
of the ten years' struggle against the British Parliament, — John and 
Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Washington and Patrick Henry 
of Virginia, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, John Dickinson of 
Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, John Rutledge of 
South Carolina. They respectfully petitioned the king to put an end 
to their grievances, specifying thirteen acts of Parliament which they 
deemed " infringements and violations " of their rights. They urged 
on all the colonies the adoption of the " American Association " for 



104 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

the boycott of British trade, both import and export, and after a six 
weeks' session adjourned. Before separating, however, they voted to 




COMMEMORATIVE OF THE BATTLE ON LEXINGTON GREEN 

I, statue of a minuteman, by H. H. Kitson; 2, bowlder marking the line of 
Captain Parker's troops; 3, Major Pitcairn's pistols; 4, the oldest Revolutionary 

monument in America, 1799 



reassemble on the tenth of the following May, unless the obnoxious 
legislation of Parliament were repealed before that day, 

118. Armed Rebellion in Massachusetts. But before the second 
Continental Congress convened the British regulars and the rustic 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 



lOS 



militia of Massachusetts had met on the field of battle. General 
Gage, who succeeded Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts in 
the summer of 1774, tried to prevent the colonial legislature from 
meeting. But in spite of his prohibition they assembled at Salem 
and later at Cambridge and Concord. They appointed a Com- 
mittee of Safety, began to collect powder and military stores, and 
assumed the government of the province outside the limits of Boston, 
where Gage had his regiments intrenched. Early in 1775 came news 
that Parliament, in spite of the repeated pleadings of Chatham, 
Burke, and Fox, had 
rejected the petition 
sent by the first Conti- 
nental Congress and 
had declared that "re- 
bellion existed in the 
American colonies." 

119. The Battle of 
Lexington. On the 
night of the eighteenth 
of April Gage sent 
troops to seize the 
powder which the pro- 
vincials had collected 

at Concord and at the same time to arrest the "traitors" John 
Hancock and Samuel Adams, who had taken refuge with par- 
son Jonas Clark of Lexington. But the ardent Boston patriot Paul 
Revere had learned of the expedition, and, galloping ahead of the 
British troops, he roused the farmers on the way and warned the 
refugees. When the van of the British column reached Lexington, 
they found a little company of "minutemen" (militia ready to fight 
at a minute's notice) drawn up on the village green under Captain 
Parker. The British major Pitcairn ordered "the rebels" to disperse. 
Then came a volley of musket shots, apparently without the major's 
orders, and the British marched on, leaving eight minutemen dead or 
dying on the green. Reaching Concord, Pitcairn's troops destroyed 
the powder which the natives had not yet hidden and soon began 
the long march back to Boston, harassed by a deadly fire from be- 
hind stone walls and apple trees. Lord Percy, with the main column. 




SCALE OF MILES 
6 i 2 4 ■ i f. 



Boston Ilariuj, 

Jorchester 
Heights /7 

^ n 



PAUL REVERE's route, APRIL 19, 1775 



io6 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

met the exhausted troops just below Lexington Green and conducted 
them safely within the British lines. The colonial militia, aroused 
for miles around, closed in upon Boston 16,000 strong and held 
Gage besieged in his capital. 

120. The Colonists' View of their Rights. When we review, 
after a century and a half, the chain of events which changed the 
loyal British-Americans, of 1763 into rebels in arms against their 
king in 177s, we see that the cause of the Revolution was a difference 
of opinion as to the nature of the British Empire. For the men 









A..-.- 






5 %, i --iSrl'i.rri-l*^;-"'^- -"--- 




THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON 

From a drawing by an eyewitness 

on this side of the Atlantic the Empire was a jederation under a 
common sovereign. Each part of the federation was composed of 
groups of freemen who enjoyed all the ''immemorial rights" of Eng- 
lishmen,— a fair trial by one's peers, freedom of speech and assembly, 
and, above all, the right to vote money for the expenses of the king's 
government through their own representative bodies. These rights, 
they claimed, were guaranteed by their charters, which gave them 
all the privileges of Englishmen living in the realm: In theory they 
acknowledged the right of Parliament to regulate the commerce of 
the whole Empire, but in practice they had so long violated or evaded 
the Navigation Acts which they thought harmful to their own trade 
that the belated attempt of English ministers to enforce them seemed 
like a new "tyranny." 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 107 

121. The British View. On the other side of the Atlantic the 
emphasis was on the unity oi the British Empire. The great burden * 

^Tdebt incurred in the French wars, the desire to make America pay 
part of the expense for their own administration and defense, and, 
above all, the determination of King George and his Tory ministers 
to make the royal authority obeyed throughout the Empire, led to 
the new rigorous policy towards the colonies. With few exceptions, 
public men in England failed to see that the American colonies had 
any ground of complaint. If England controlled their trade, she • 
also favored it, giving colonial goods preference in her markets and 
granting bounties on colonial products and drawbacks on colonial 
1 imports. It was universally agreed that no country of Europe had 
I ' a more liberal colonial trade policy than England. As to the charters,, 
they were royal favors creating corporations with certain powers of 
self-government (like a city charter), but not intended, of course, 
to exempt the grantees from the supreme authority of the state. 
That authority was the Parliament, in which the American subjects 
of his majesty were, like the great mass of English subjects, repre- 
sented by the Commons. 

122. Was Reconciliation Possible ? Whether such widely sepa- 
rated theories as the federal empire of the colonial statesmen and 1 
the consolidated empire of the English statesmen could have been 
reconciled if the direction of affairs in England had been in the hands 
of wise men like Pitt, Burke, and Fox, we cannot say. Probably the 
colonies had already reached such a stage of economic self-sufficiency 
and political self-direction that their continued union with the British 
Empire could have been only on the basis of a virtual independence 
(like Canada's or Australia's today) such as not even a Pitt or a 
Burke would have tolerated in the eighteenth century. 

123. The Responsibility of King George III. That the separa- 
tion came when it did must be laid chiefly to the conduct of King 
George HI. By lavish use of bribes ("golden pills"), places, and 
pensions he built up the powerful clique of the " King's Friends " in 
Parliament, who thwarted every move for broad and liberal states- 
manship at Westminster. He gave his confidence to ministers of the 
type of Bute and Lord North, who made his will their law. He 
was determined to press the quarrel with the colonies to an issue, 
exclaiming with rehef when the " Intolerable Acts" of 1774 were 



io8 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

passed : " The die is now cast ; the colonies must submit or triumph." 
This steady refusal of conciliation on his part added thousands to 
the followers of the irreconcilable spirits in the colonies, like Patrick 
Henry and the Adamses, and gave color to their rhetorical warnings 
against being " reduced to slavery." We have the testimony of the 
best English historians of the nineteenth century that George III 
was the evil spirit of the British Empire. " He had rooted out cour- 
age, frankness, and independence from the councils of state, and 
put puppets in the place of men" (Trevelyan) ; ''his tactics were 
fraught with danger to the liberties of the people" (May) ; "his 
acts were as criminal as any which led Charles I to the scaffold" 
(Lecky) ; "the shame of the darkest hour of England's history lies 
wholly at his door" (Green). 

References 

The Authority of Parliament in the Colonies: G. E. Howard, The Pre- 
liminaries of the Revolution (American Nation Series), chaps, i-v; W. M. 
Sloane, The French War and the Revolution, chap, x; J. A. Woodburn, Causes 
of the American Revolution (Johns Hopkins Studies, Series X, No. 12) ; Lecky's 
American Revolution, chap, i, pp. 1-49; Carl Becker, The Beginnings of the 
American People, chap, ii; Edward Channing, History of the United States. 
Vol. Ill, chap, i; Wm. MacDonald, Select Charters of American History, 1606- 
^775-! Nos. 53-56; A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. II, 
Nos. 45, 46, 88, 89; G. L. Beer, British Colonial Policy, 17 54-1765; E. L. 
BoGART, Industrial History of the United States, chap. vii. 

Taxation without Representation: Becker, The Eve of the Revolution 
(Chronicles, Vol. XI), chaps, ii-iv; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical 
History of America, Vol. VI, chap, i; John Fiske, The American Revo- 
lution, Vol. I, chaps, i, ii; M. C. Tyler, Literary History of the American 
Revolution, Vol. I; G. Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, Vol. I; 
Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 138-152; Howard, chaps, vi-xv; Bogart, 
chap, viii; Channing, Vol. Ill, chaps, ii-v; E. M. Avery, History of the 
United States and its People, Vol. V, chaps, ii-ix; MacDonald, Nos. 57-67. 

The Punishment of Massachusetts : Fiske, chap, iii; Trevelyan, chap, iii; 
Howard, chaps, xv-xvii; Winsor, chap, ii; Sloane, chaps, xiv, xv; Becker 
(Chronicles), chaps, v-vi; Channing, Vol. Ill, chaps, v-vi; Avery, Vol. V, 
chaps, xi-xiii. 

Topics for Special Reports 

I. English Opinions of the American Cause: (Dr. Samuel Johnson's) 
Hart, Vol. II, No. 156; (Wm. Pitt's) Hart, Vol. II, No. 142; Old South 
Leaflets, No. 199; (Edmund Burke's) Old South Leaflets, No. 200; Wood- 
burn, Lecky's American Revolution, pp. 1514-165; Trevelyan, Vol. I, pp. 28-44. 



BRITISH RULE IN AMERICA 109 

2. The Navigation Acts: Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 45, 46, 67, 85, 87, 131; 
WiNSOR, Vol. VI, pp. 5-12; G. L. Beer, The Commercial Policy of England 
towards the American Colonies, pp. 35-65; Bogart, pp. 90-103. 
P 3. The Conspiracy of Pontiac: F. A. Ogg, The Old Northwest (Chronicles, 
Vol. XIX) , pp. 1-19 ; Sloane, pp. 99-103 ; Winsor, Vol. VI, pp. 688-701 ; 
Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol. I, pp. 172-321; Vol. II, pp. 299- 
313; Channing and Lansing, The Story of the Great Lakes, pp. 113-134. 

4. The Boston Tea Party: John Fiske, Essays Historical and Literary, 
Vol. II, pp. 163-195; A. P. Peabody, Boston Mobs before the Revolution 
{Atlantic Monthly, September, 1888) ; MacDonald, Nos. 64-70; Hart, Vol. II, 
No. 152; Tyler, Vol. I, pp. 246-266; Trevelyan, Vol. I, pp. 135-139, 175-192; 
Old South Leaflets, No. 68. 

5. Thomas Hutchinson, the Last Royal Governor of Massachusetts: 
Sloane, pp. 163-170; Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 139-148; Fiske, Essays, Vol. I, 
pp. 1-51 ; WiNSOR, Vol. VI, pp. 49-58; J. H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massa- 
chusetts, pp. 145-174; Becker (Chronicles), pp. 165-199. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 

The Declaration of Independence 

124. The Second Continental Congress. " The war has actually 
begun. The next gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our 
ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the 
field. Why stand we here idle ? ... Is life so dear or peace so 
sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery ? Forbid 
it, Almighty God ! I know not what course others may take ; but 
as for me, give me liberty or give me death ! " These prophetic words 
were spoken by Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses 
less than a month before the "clash of arms" at Lexington and 
Concord, Less than a month after that event the second Continental 
Congress met at Philadelphia (May lo, 1775). Events had moved 
rapidly since the adjournment of the previous October. George III 
had received the petition of Congress with the remark that the " New 
England Governments were in rebellion" ; blood had been shed on 
both sides, not by irresponsible mobs or taunted soldiery, but by 
troops marshaled in battle ; eastern Massachusetts had risen in arms 
and held its governor besieged in his capital of Boston ; and on the 
very day when Congress assembled, Ethan Allen and his Green 
Mountain Boys surprised the British garrison in Fort Ticonderoga 
and turned them out '^in the name of the Great Jehovah and the 
Continental Congress." 

125. Formal Declaration of War. To meet the crisis the second 
Continental Congress, with the tacit consent of all the colonies, 
assumed the powers of a regular government. It utilized the rude 
colonial militia gathered around Boston as the nucleus of a con- 
tinental army and appointed George Washington to the supreme 
command. It issued paper money, made trade regulations, sent 
agents abroad to win the favor of foreign courts, advised the colonies 
to set up governments for themselves, regardless of the king's officers^ 

110 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION in 

and made formal declaration of war (July 6, 1775) in these words: 
"Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. . . . Against violence we 
have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities cease 
on the part of our aggressors." In spite of the fact, however, that 
the appeal to arms had already been made, there was enough con- 
servative sentiment in the Congress to support John Dickinson in 
his motion to send another appeal to the king to restore peace and 
harmony with his colonies in America. 

126. American Protestations of Loyalty before 1775. Until 
this final petition of Congress was spurned, the leaders of the colonial 
resistance to parliamentary taxation almost to a man protested their 
loyalty to King George III and the British Empire. "I have never 
heard from any person drunk or sober," said Benjamin Franklin 
to Lord Chatham in 1774, "the least expression of a wish for separa- 
tion." Washington declared that even when he went to Cambridge 
to take command of the colonial army, the thought of independence 
was "abhorrent" to him. And John Adams said that he was avoided 
in the streets of Philadelphia in 1775 "like a man infected with 
leprosy " for his leanings toward " independency." To be sure, there 
were skeptical and ironical Tories in the colonies, who declared that 
the protestations of loyalty in the petitions of Congress and in the 
mouths of the " patriots " were only " the gold leaf to conceal the 
treason beneath" ; but it is hard to believe that men like Washing- 
ton, Jefferson, Franklin, and Jay were insincere in their public 
utterances. 

127. Events of 1775 which widened the Breach. However, by 
the end of 1775 the doctrine of the allegiance of the colonies to King 
George was so flatly contradicted by the facts of the situation that it 
became ridiculous. From month to month the breach between the 
colonies and the mother country had widened. In March, 1775, 
Benjamin Franklin, who for ten years had been the agent for several 
of the colonies in London, returned to America, thereby confessing 
that nothing more was to be accomplished by diplomacy. In April 
occurred the battle of Lexington. In May came the bold capture 
of Fort Ticonderoga. In June Gage's army stormed the American 
breastworks on Bunker Hill in three desperate and bloody assaults, 
and burned the adjacent town of Charlestown. In July Massachu- 
setts set up a new government independent of the king, and George 



112 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

Washington took command of the colonial army which was besieging ; 
Gage in Boston. In August King George issued a proclamation call- 
ing on all loyal subjects to suppress the rebellion and sedition im 
North America. In September he hired 20,000 German soldiers from 1 
the princes of Hesse, Anhalt, and Brunswick, to reduce the colonies 
to submission. In October a British captain, without provocation, 
sailed into Falmouth harbor (Portland, Maine) and burned the town, 




Sfliis exc'eIlency 
WILLIAM TRYON, Esquire, 

Cjptain General, and Governor in Chief in and lover the Province of Nnu.Tork. and the 
Territories depending thereon in ylmerica. Chancellor and Vice Admiral of the fame. 

A PROCLAMATION. 

lITHtREAS I have received His Majefty's Koyaf FrociamaiJO), gives ai :hc Court at 4^/. Jiimii s, the Twenty- 
'' third Djy of vfe^'^? lart, in the Words following ! ] 

BY THE KING, 
A Proclamation, 

For fupprefsing REBELLI.ON and SEDITION. 



TITLE or KING GEORGE IIl's PROCLAMATION OF REBELLION 



rendering looo people homeless on the eve of a severe New England 
winter. In November two small American armies under Richard 
Montgomery and Benedict Arnold were invading Canada with the 
sanction of the Continental Congress. And on the last day of 
December, 1775, in a blinding snowstorm, the colonial troops made 
an attack on Quebec, in which Montgomery was killed and Arnold 
severely wounded. The news of the burning of Falmouth and the 
king's contract for German mercenaries reached Congress on the 
same day. The indignation of the assembly was extreme. '^I am 
ready now, brother rebel," said a Southern member to Ward of Rhode 
Island, " to declare ourselves independent ; we have had sufficient 
answer to our petition." 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 113 

128. Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." On the tenth of 
January, 1776, there came from a press in Philadelphia a pamphlet 
entitled " Common Sense," which made tens of thousands throughout 
the colonies ready also to declare themselves independent. The 
author was Thomas Paine, an Englishman of scanty fortune but 
liberal ideas, who had won Franklin's friendship in London and had 
come to the colonies in 1774 with what he later called "an aversion 
to monarchy, as debauching to the dignity of man." In " Common 
Sense" Paine argued with convincing clearness that the position of 
the colonies was thoroughly inconsistent, — in full rebellion against 
England, yet protesting loyalty to the king. He urged them to lay 
aside sentimental scruples, to realize that they were the nucleus of 
a great American nation destined to cover the continent and to be 
an example to the world of a people free from the servile traditions 
of monarchy and the low public morals of the Old World. It is 
doubtful whether any other printed work in all American history has 
had a greater influence than Paine's '^ Common Sense." Over 100,000 
copies were sold, the equivalent of a circulation of 25,000,000 in our 
present population. Washington spoke enthusiastically of the " sound 
doctrine and unanswerable reasoning " of the pamphlet ; and Edmund 
Randolph, the first attorney-general of the United States, said that 
the declaration of the independence of America was due, next to 
George III, to Thomas Paine. 

129. The Declaration of Independence. When, therefore, the 
legislature of North Carolina ordered its representatives in Congress 
to advocate independence,^ Virginia and all the New England colonies 
fell quickly into line. The Virginia delegation took the lead, its 
chairman, Richard Henry Lee, moving, on the seventh of June, that 
tJicse united colonies are and oj right ought to be free and independent 
states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, 
and that all political connection between i,hcm and the state of 
Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved. The vote on this 

1 The taxpayers of North Carolina had already resisted the king's troops in arms, in 1771, 
at Alamance, near the source of the Cape Fear River. They had been beaten and a number 
of them had been hanged as traitors. In May, 1775, some North Carolina patriots, of the 
count}' of Mecklenburg, had voted that " the king's civil and military commissions v/ere all 
annulled and vacated." This vote was practically a declaration of independence by the 
patriots of Mecklenburg County, but no formal declaration was drawn up, and the North 
Carolina delegates failed to report the resolution to the Continental Congress. 



114 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

momentous motion was postponed until the first of July, and a com- 
mittee composed of Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Sherman, and 
Livingston was appointed to frame a fitting Declaration of Independ- 
ence in case the motion was carried. Jefferson wrote the document 
in the fervor of spontaneous patriotism, " without reference to book 
or pamphlet," as he later declared. His draft was somewhat modified 



-n 



I 



OTAHtK\CA. U (Sfv^*^-^ Cm|,*f^ *^k*,rv<A5 



1 _.^_ lj_fc<^fesA-ii2:?^!i^i^?J>-^— 



TifiUi:*-^ 



I 



.......^ o^^i^iu±cA <.^^ ---, -«»^ *^^ r-^ ^7 



FACSIMILE OF THE OPENING LINES OF THE DECLARATION 
OF INDEPENDENCE 



by the other members of the committee, especially Adams and Frank- 
lin. On the first day of July, Lee's motion was taken from the 
table for debate, and on the next day was passed by the vote of 
all the colonies except New York. Two days later (July 4) Jefferson's 
Declaration was adopted.^ We celebrate the latter event in our 
national holiday, but the motion declaring our independence was 
carried the second of July. 

1 The Declaration was engrossed on parchment and signed a few weeks later by fifty-six 
members of the Congress. It is still preserved in the archives of the State Department at 
Washington. Until 1894 it was on view to the public, but in that year, owing to the rapid 
fading and cracking of the parchment, this most famous document was inclosed in a metal 
tube to protect it from the light and air. 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 115 

130. Analysis of the Declaration. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence was issued out of "a decent respect for the opinion of 
mankind." It asserted in the opening paragraph that all men are 
created equal and endowed with "certain unalienable rights," such 
as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which it is the pur- 
pose of all governments to secure ; and that " whenever any form of 
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the 
people to alter or to abolish it." The king of Great Britain, it de- 
clared, had violated those rights by a long train of abuses, and in 
proof there was submitted to a candid world a list of twenty-seven 
arbitrary and tyrannical acts aimed at the liberty of his American 
subjects. He had proved himself unfit to be the ruler of a free people. 
"We, therefore," concludes the Declaration, "the Representatives of 
the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, . . . 
solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of 
Right ought to be. Free and Independent States. . . . And for the 
support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of 
divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our 
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." 

131. Effect of the Declaration. The Declaration of Independence 
put an end to the inconsistency of the colonial position. It made the 
troops of Washington, poor and meager as they were, a national army. 
It changed the struggle on the part of America from one of armed 
resistance to the unlawful acts of a sovereign still acknowledged, to 
a war against a foreign king and state. Until the Declaration was 
published the Tories or Loyalists, of whom there were tens of thou- 
sands in the American colonies, were champions of one side of a de- 
batable question, namely, whether the abuses of the king's ministers 
justified armed resistance ; but after the Declaration loyalty to the 
king of Great Britain became treason to their country. As traitors 
they were accordingly treated — their property confiscated, their utter- 
ances controlled, and their conduct regulated by severe laws in every 
one of the new states. In a general order of July 9, 1776, Washington 
communicated the Declaration to his army in New York, whither he 
had moved after compelling Howe to evacuate Boston (March 17, 
1776). "The General hopes," read the order, "that this important 
event will serve as an incentive to every officer and soldier to act 
with fidelity and courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety 



ii6 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

of his country depend (under God) solely on the success of our 
arms; and that he is in the service of a state possessed of sufficient 
power to reward his merit and advance him to the highest honors of 
a free country."^ 

The Revolutionary War 

A detailed description of battles and campaigns is profitable only 
to experts in military science, whereas the causes that lead a country 
into war, especially into a war for independence, are most important 
stages in the evolution of a people's political and moral life. There- 
fore, after our rather full study of the preliminaries of the American 
Revolution, we shall dwell but briefly on the actual conflict. 

132. Washington driven from New York and New Jersey. 
After Washington had compelled the British to evacuate Boston, 
the three major generals, Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne, assumed the 
conduct of the war against the rebellious colonies (May, 1776). 
Washington tried to defend New York, but Howe's superior force 
of veterans drove his militia from Brooklyn Heights, Long Island, 
and compelled him to retreat step by step through the city of New 
York and up the Hudson, then across the river into New Jer- 
sey, and then across the state of New Jersey to a safe posi- 
tion on the western bank of the Delaware. With 3000 men left 
in the hands of the British as prisoners, and 7000 more under 
the command of the insubordinate and treacherous Charles Lee 
refusing to come to his aid, Washington wrote to his brother in 
December : '' If every nerve is not strained to recruit a new army 
with all possible expedition, I think the game is pretty nearly up." 
A determined move by Howe from New York to the Delaware might 
easily have overwhelmed the remnants of Washington's army, some 
2000 troops, and put an end then and there to the American Revolu- 
tion. But fortunately for the patriot cause Howe was a lukewarm 
enemy. Surrounded by Tory flatterers, he believed that in chasing 
Washington from New York and New Jersey he had already given 
the American rebellion its deathblow, and that he had only to wait 
a few weeks before the penitent Congress at Philadelphia would be 

1 The troops and the citiiens of New York celebrated this announcement by throwing 
down the leaden statue of George III, which stood on Bowling Green, and melting it into 
bullets for the colonial rifles. 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 117 

suing for the pardon George III had authorized him to grant when 
resistance to the royal will should cease, 

133. The Recovery of New Jersey. But Washington with mag- 
nificent audacity recrossed the Delaware on Christmas night of 1776, 
surprised and overwhelmed a post of 1000 Hessians at Trenton, and 
a few days later defeated the British column of Lord Cornwallis at 
Princeton and drove it back to the neighborhood of New York. 
The courage and skill of Washington had saved the patriot cause. 
Enlistments increased ; many loyalists in New Jersey swore allegiance 
to the United States ; and our agents and emissaries in Europe took 
courage to urge our cause. Cornwallis himself, when complimenting 
Washington five years later on the skill with which the latter had 
forced him to the final surrender at Yorktown, added : " But after 
all, your Excellency's achievements in New Jersey were such that 
nothing could surpass them." 

134. The British Plan for the Control of the Hudson. Dis- 
appointed in their hopes that the patriot cause would collapse of 
itself, the British ministry prepared an elaborate plan of attack for 
the campaign of 1777. Three armies were to invade New York. 
Burgoyne descending from Montreal via Lake Champlain and the 
upper Hudson, St. Leger marching eastward from Lake Ontario 
through the Mohawk valley, and Howe ascending the Hudson from 
New York City were to converge at Albany and so, by controlling 
the Hudson, were to shut New England off from the southern colonies. 
This ambitious scheme, with its total disregard of the conditions of 
travel in northern and western New York, showed how little the 
British War Department had learned from Braddock's defeat twenty 
years earlier. 

135. Burgoyne's Surrender at Saratoga. St. Leger, toiling 
through the western wilderness, was defeated at Oriskany by the old 
Indian fighter General Herkimer long before he had got halfway to 
Albany ; Howe's instructions to move up the river were tucked into 
a pigeonhole by the war minister, Lord George Germaine, who was 
anxious to get off to the country to shoot pheasants, and left there 
to gather the dust of years ; while Burgoyne, fighting his way step 
by step against the dead resistance of the tangled and cluttered forests 
of northern New York and the live resistance of New England riflemen 
who gathered in swarms to harass his fatigued columns, was brought 



Ii8 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

to bay near Saratoga, and by the dashing charges of Arnold, Morgan,, 
and Schuyler was obliged to surrender his total force of 6000 mem 
and officers to General Horatio Gates, commander of the continental! 
army on the Hudson (October 17, 1777). i 

136. The Turning Point of the War. Sir Edward Creasy has 5 
included Burgoyn^'s defeat at Saratoga among his " Fifteen Decisive ; 
Battles of the World." It was the turning point of the Revolution.. 
The total failure of the Hudson River campaign left the British with-- 
out a plan of war. To be sure, General Howe had sailed down from 1 
New York to the head of Chesapeake Bay, while he ought to have ■ 
been marching up the Hudson to join Burgoyne, and seized and held 
the "rebel capital," Philadelphia, in spite of Washington's plucky 
opposition at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, But though the 
British officers with their Tory friends in Philadelphia were spending 
a gay winter at fetes and balls while Washington's destitute frag- 
ment of an army was shivering and starving at Valley Forge close by, 
nevertheless the advantage of the winter of 1 777-1 778 was with the 
Americans. For the attempts of the British both to crush Washing- 
ton's army and to sever the northern and southern colonies had failed. 
The impossibility of occupying the country back of the few seaport 
towns, such as New York, Newport, and Philadelphia, began to be 
apparent to the British ministry, as it had from the first been 
apparent to many British merchants, who had advised making the 
war a purely naval one, for the blockade of the American ports and 
the destruction of their commerce. The amiable Lord North, dis- 
tressed as much by the prolongation of the war as by the disaster 
to Burgoyne, was allowed to send an embassy to the American Con- 
gress early in 1778, conceding to the colonies every right they had 
contended for since the days of the Stamp Act, if they would only 
lay down their arms and return to British allegiance. 

137. The French Alliance. But Lord North's offer came too 
late. The victory at Saratoga had opened the eyes of another court 
and sovereign. The French ministry, which for over a year had 
been refusing the repeated requests of the colonies for an alliance, 
doubting if the American revolt were a weapon strong enough to use 
in taking revenge on England for the humiliating defeat of twenty 
years before, decided in the affirmative after Saratoga, In February, 
1778, treaties of commerce and alliance were signed by the French 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 



119 



and American diplomats. The treaty of alliance (the only one ever 
made by the United States) pledged each nation to continue the war 
with England until the other was ready to make peace. 

138. The War assumes a European Character. The French 
alliance was a great gain for the Americans. By it the independence 
of the United States was recog- 
nized by the strongest power of (^^ ^t5^ cy y^i 



continental Europe. Men and 
money, both sorely needed, were 
furnished to the struggling 
states, and, above all, a fleet was 
sent over to deliver the Ameri- 
can seaports from the British. 
John Paul Jones, the intrepid 
sea fighter, was fitted out with 
five vessels in France and, flying 
the new American flag from the 
masthead of the Bonhomme 
Richard, attacked the British 
frigates in their own Waters. As 
the war assumed a European 
aspect, Spain joined England's 
enemies (1779) with the hope of 
regaining the island of Jamaica 
and the stronghold of Gibraltar; 
and the next year Holland, Eng- 
land's old commercial rival, 
came into the league for the 
destruction of Britain's naval 
power and the overthrow of her 
colonial empire. Thus the Amer- 
ican Revolution, after the vic- 



'ojy 






"7 



r/ ^^5^**? ^<-<f /cCf^ 













LETTER OF FRANKLIN TO THE COUNT 

OF VERGENNES, THE EARLIEST 

DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE OF 
THE AMERICAN CONGRESS 



tory at Saratoga, developed into 

a coalition of four powers against Great Britain ; and the American 
continent became again, for the fifth time within a century, the 
ground on which France and England fought out their mighty duel. 
139. The British evacuate Philadelphia. Doubting their ability 
to defend the forts on the Delaware against a French fleet, the British 



120 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLANX) 

evacuated Philadelphia in the summer of 1778, and fell back upon 
New York, escaping defeat at the hands of the American army on 
the way only by the treachery of General Charles Lee, who basely 
ordered a retreat at the battle of Monmouth. Washington arrived 
on the scene of action in time to save the day for the American 
cause, and sent Lee into long-merited disgrace, 

140. The War in the South. At the close of 1778 the British 
transferred the seat of war to the South, with a view of detaching the 
states below the Potomac from the patriot cause. There was much 
British sentiment in Georgia and the Carolinas, where Sir Henry Clin- 
ton enrolled some 2000 Loyalist troops in his army. The war in the 
Carolinas assumed a civil character, therefore, marked by bitter 
partisan fighting and guerrilla raids. The British had no systematic 
plan of campaign, but marched and countermarched in an irregular 
line from coast to interior and interior to coast, wherever the resist- 
ance was least and the hope of attracting soldiers to their banners 
greatest. Their capture of Savannah in December, 1778, enabled them 
to reestablish the royal government in Georgia, and in 1780 they took 
Charleston, the other great southern port. In the interior of the 
Carolinas they were generally successful, until General Nathanael 
Greene, next to Washington the ablest commander on the American 
side, was sent to replace Gates, the ''hero of Saratoga," who had 
ignominiously fled from the field on his defeat at Camden, South 
Carolina (August, 1780).^ By the victory at Cowpens (January, 
1 781) and the valiant stand at Guilford (March, 1781) Morgan and 
Greene retrieved the defeat of Gates and recovered the interior of 
the Carolinas. 

141. King's Mountain. The most remarkable battle and the 
turning point of the war south of the Potomac River was the en- 
gagement at King's Mountain, on the border between North and 
South Carolina. Here about 1000 sturdy frontiersmen and Indian 
fighters recruited from the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, and 
Georgia surrounded and captured a body of some 1200 Tory militia- 
men collected by Colonel Ferguson, who had been sent by General 

1 Baron De Kalb, who, with Lafayette, had joined Washington's army during the famous 
campaign of 1776, was killed in this battle. Other distinguished foreigners who gave their 
services to the American cause were Baron Steuben, a veteran Prussian officer, and the 
Polish generals, Kosciusko and Pulaski. The latter was mortally wounded in the attack on 
Savannah, October 9, 1780. 




THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR ON THE ATLANTIC SEABOARD 



12 2 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

Cornwallis to clear the guerrillas out of the upland regions and make 
his march through the Carolinas easy. 

142. The Treachery of Benedict Arnold. Meanwhile the most 
distressing incident of the war was taking place on the Hudson. 
Benedict Arnold, who had so signally distinguished himself for 
bravery at Quebec and Saratoga, had not been advanced so rapidly 
in the American army as he thought he deserved to be. Encouraged 
by his friends among the British officers, and by his wife, who had 
been a belle in the Tory circles of Philadelphia, he nursed his injured 
pride to a point where he determined to betray his country. He 
easily obtained from Washington the command of the important 
fortress of West Point on the Hudson, and forthwith opened nego- 
tiations with Sir Henry Clinton to hand the post over to the British. 
Major Andre, the British agent in the transaction, was caught inside 
the American lines at Tarrytown and the incriminating papers were 
found in his boots. He was hanged as a spy. Warned of Andre's 
capture in the nick of time, Arnold fled hastily from his breakfast 
table and reached a British war vessel lying in the Hudson. He was 
rewarded with a brigadier-generalship in Clinton's army, and as- 
sumed command of the British troops in Virginia.^ 

143. Cornwallis's Surrender at Yorktown. Arnold was joined 
by Lord Cornwallis (to whom Clinton had turned over his command 
in the South) in the summer of 1781. Their combined forces forti- 
fied a position at Yorktown, to await a British fleet bringing reen- 
forcements from New York. Forced to abandon the Carolinas by 
the disaster at King's Mountain, Cornwallis now hoped to conquer the 
state of Virginia, which was protected only by a meager force under 
the gallant young Marquis de Lafayette, Washington's trusted friend, 
and the most devoted of the eleven foreign major generals who 
served in the American army. But the tables were turned on Corn- 
wallis. While he was waiting in Yorktown, a French fleet under De 
Grasse, arriving off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, defeated the 
British squadron which was bringing the reenforcements from New 

1 After the war Arnold went to England to live, where he had to endure at times insolent 
reminders of his treachery. He died, an old man, in London, June 14, 1801, dressed, by his 
own pathetic request, in his old colonial uniform with the epaulets and sword knot presented 
to him by Washington after the victory of Saratoga. In the great monument erected on the 
battlefield of Saratoga (1883) the niche which should contain Arnold's statue is left empty, 
while statues of Gates, Morgan, and Schuyler adorn the other three sides of the monument 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 123 

York, and landed 3000 French troops on the peninsula in their stead. 
At the same moment Washington, always on the right spot at the right 
moment, conducted a brilliant march of four hundred miles from the 
Hudson to the York River, with 2000 Americans and 4000 French- 
men, and, effecting a junction with Lafayette, penned Cornwallis up 
in the narrow peninsula between the York and the James. Cornwallis 
made a brave but vain effort to break the besieging lines. On the 
nineteenth of October, 1781, he surrendered his army of 7000 men 
and officers as prisoners of war. The British attempt to conquer 
the revolting colonies was over. North and south their armies had met 
with disaster. They abandoned the posts which they still held, with 
the exception of New York, and withdrew to the West Indies to 
triumph over France in a great naval battle and still preserve their 
ascendancy in that rich region of the western world. 

144. The War in the West. While the American army on the 
Atlantic seaboard was successfully repelling the British invasion 
with the aid of the French fleet, a bold campaign was being con- 
ducted by the hardy frontiersmen of the West for the overthrow of 
England's authority beyond the Alleghenies. 

145. The Proclamation Line of 1763. In the very year that the 
British took possession of the vast territory between the eastern 
mountains and the Mississippi, King George had issued a proclama- 
tion forbidding his governors in the American colonies to extend 
their authority or to permit settlement west of a line running along 
the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. The ostensible reason for draw- 
ing this " Proclamation Line " was to secure the allegiance and trade 
of the Indians so lately devoted to France, by giving them assurance 
that their hunting grounds would not be invaded by the white settlers 
from across the mountains ; but the real reason was to curtail the 
power of the colonies, discredit their old "sea-to-sea" charters, and 
confine them to the narrow region along the Atlantic coast, where 
they could be within easier reach of the British authority. 

146. The Westward March of the Pioneers. It was a bitter 
disappointment to the ambitious frontiersmen, after having de- 
feated the French attempt to shut them in behind the mountains, to 
have the British king adopt the same policy. They felt that they 
were being kept out of a region destined for them by nature, and 
they resented being left exposed to danger from the fierce Indians 



124 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 



who swept up and down the frontier in their intertribal raids and 
wars. Therefore the sturdy woodsmen and pioneers from the back 
counties of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas had pushed 
across the mountains into the densely wooded land of the Ohio, the 
Cumberland, and the Tennessee valleys. In 1769 Daniel Boone, 
the most celebrated of these pioneers, set out from his home in 




THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN THE WEST 

North Carolina to seek "Kentucke" (the "dark and bloody 
ground"), which was stained by centuries of Indian feuds. In the 
next three years Virginia pioneers, led by James Robertson and John 
Sevier, had founded settlements on the Watauga River in the western 
mountains of North Carolina ; and, like the early emigrants to the 
shores of New England, were devising a government even while they 
were clearing the soil and defending their rude homes against the 
attack of the savages. 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 125 

147. The Victories on the Kanawha and the Watauga. Though 
Pontiac's great conspiracy (p. 95) to keep the English out of 
the forts of the Northwest had been crushed (1765), and the Iro- 

fr quois had abandoned their claims to the region south of the Ohio 
River (1768), nevertheless the savage tribes of Mingos, Shawnees, 

► and Cherokees disputed with the white men every mile of the territory 
west of the Alleghenies. In October, 1774 (while the first Conti- 
nental Congress was discussing methods of resistance to English 
taxation), a great victory of the Virginia backwoodsmen over Corn- 
stalk, the Shawnee chieftain, at the mouth of the Kanawha River, 
had secured the rich lands of the present state of Kentucky against 
Indian domination. And in November, 1776 (while Washington's 
dwindling army was fleeing across the state of New Jersey), the 
decisive repulse of the Cherokees from the Watauga settlements 
opened to the pioneers the equally rich lands of Tennessee. The vic- 
tories on the Kanawha and the Watauga, fought against the Indian 
foe, by men in the fringed hunting shirt of deerskin and by the rude 
tactics of Indian warfare, have often gone unmentioned, while un- 
important skirmishes on the seaboard, between uniformed soldiers, 
commanded by officers in gold braid, have been described in detail. 
But in their effects on our country's history these Indian fights, with 
the later victories north of the Ohio to which they opened the way, 
deserve to rank with Saratoga and Yorktown. For if the latter vic- 
tories decided that America should take her place among the nations 
of the world, the former proclaimed that the new nation would not 
be content to be shut up in a little strip of seacoast, but had set its 
face westward to possess the whole continent. 

148. The Character of the Western Settlements. The settlers 
in Kentucky and Tennessee numbered only a few hundred at the out- 
break of the American Revolution, but they were intensely democratic 
and patriotic. In May, 1775, delegates from four "stations" in 
Kentucky " met in a wide field of white clover, under the shade 
of a monstrous elm," and made wise laws for their infant colony. 
When a party of campers in the heart of Kentucky heard the news 
of the first battle of the Revolution, they enthusiastically christened 
their camp " Lexington." In the Watauga settlement the Tories were 
drummed out of camp several months before the Declaration of 



12 6 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 



Independence was adopted. Soon after that event Kentucky, though 
a county of Virginia, petitioned Congress to be received as the four- 
teenth state of the Union and sent a delegation to Patrick Henry, 
governor of Virginia, to offer that state the services of ''" a respectable 
body of prime riflemen." 

149. George Rogers Clark wins the Northwestern Territory. 
One of these delegates was George Rogers Clark, a young Virginian 
scarcely past twenty, who had cast in his lot with the Kentucky 

settlers on the Ohio. Clark conceived 
and executed a plan of campaign which 
entitles him to be called the Washing- 
ton of the West. Sending spies across 
the Ohio to the Illinois country, he 
learned that the Indians and French 
there were only lukewarm in their alle- 
giance to their new English masters. 
He therefore determined to seize this 
huge territory for the patriot cause, 
and in the autumn of 1777 went to 
Williamsburg to lay his plans before 
Governor Patrick Henry. Henry, Jef- 
ferson, and other prominent Virginians 
approved Clark's bold scheme, but the 
utmost that the state could do for him 
was to authorize him to raise 350 men 
and advance him $1200 in depreciated currency. It was a poor 
start for the conquest of a region as large as New England, New 
York, and Pennsylvania combined, but Clark belonged to the 
men of genius who persist in accomplishing tasks which men of 
judgment pronounce impossible. He surprised the posts at Kas- 
kaskia and Cahokia and, by intrepid assurance and skillful 
diplomacy, induced the French and Indians of the Mississippi 
Valley to transfer their allegiance from the British Empire to the 
new American republic. When he learned that Colonel Hamilton, 
the British commander at Detroit, had seized the fort of Vincennes 
on the Wabash, he immediately marched his men in midwinter over 
two hundred miles across the ''drowned lands" of the Wabash, 
sometimes wading through icy water up to their chins, sometimes 




GEORGE ROGERS CLARK 




ino 200 yoo 



bt^ LuDijitiid 



from Greenwich 77° 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 127 

shivering supperless on some bleak knoll, but always courageous and 
confident, until he appeared before the post of Vincennes and sum- 
moned the wonderstricken Hamilton to an immediate and uncon- 
ditional surrender (February, 1779). The capture of Vincennes was 
the deathblow of the British power north of the Ohio. 

P 

Peace 

F" 150. George III abandons the Struggle. When the news of 
Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown reached Lord North, he threw 
up his hands and exclaimed, " My God ! it is all over." The stub- 
born king was not so ready to read in Yorktown the doom of his 
tenacious policy of coercion. Always mistaking the satisfaction of 
his royal will for the salvation of the British Empire, he stormed 
against the rising sentiment for peace with America and wrote letters 
of petulant bombast to his prime minister, threatening to resign the 
British crown and retire to his ancestral domains in Germany. But 
threats and entreaties were of no avail. The nation was sick of the 
rule of the "King's Friends," and the early months of 1782 saw 
George III compelled to part with Lord North and receive into his 
service, if not into his confidence, the Whig statesmen. Lord Shel- 
burne, the new prime minister, sent a diplomatic agent to Paris to 
discuss terms of peace with the American commissioners, Jay, Frank- 
lin, and John Adams. 

151. Complications in the Peace Negotiations. The situation 
was a very complicated one. The United States, by the treaty of 
alliance with France in 1778, had pledged itself not to make a sepa- 
rate peace with England. Then the French had drawn Spain into 
the war, with the promise of recovering for her the island of Jamaica 
in the West Indies (taken by Oliver Cromwell's fleet in 1655) and 
the rock fortress of Gibraltar (captured by the English in 1704). 
The Franco-American alliance had been successful, as we have seen, 
in defeating the British invasion of the Atlantic seaboard, thus as- 
suring the independence of the United States. But the bolder Franco- 
Spanish design of destroying the naval supremacy of Great Britain 
and dividing up her colonial empire had entirely failed. It soon 
became evident to the American diplomats at Paris that France was 
planning to find consolation for her defeated ally, Spain, at the 



128 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

expense of her victorious ally, America. In fact, Vergennes, the 
French minister, had prepared a map on which the United States 
figured as the same old colonial strip between the Alleghenies and the 
sea, while the western region north of the Ohio was to be restored to 
England and that south of the Ohio to the Indians, partly under 
American and partly under Spanish protection (see map). Thus the 
new republic was to be robbed of the fruits of the labors of Boone, 
Sevier, Robertson, and Clark, and the Mississippi was to be a 
Spanish stream, '' This court is interested in separating us from Great 
Britain," wrote Jay from Paris, " but it is not their interest that we 
should become a great and formidable people," 

152. Our Great Debt to France. Yet we were greatly beholden 
to France, Her aid in men, ships, and money had been so timely 
and generous that it is almost certain that without it the American 
cause would have been lost. The Continental Congress, resorting to 
every possible device, — requisitions on the states, confiscation of 
Tory estates, domestic loans, even a national lottery, — could raise 
only a small fraction of the money needed to carry on the war. By 
1778 it had issued $63,500,000 of paper money, which was rapidly 
coming to be worth hardly more than the paper on which it was 
printed. The bracing effect on our languishing finances of the ar- 
rival of 2,500,000 francs in French gold can easily be imagined. Our 
commissioners in Paris, therefore, were instructed by Congress not 
to proceed in the peace negotiations without the consent and con- 
currence of the French ministry. 

153. The United States makes a Separate Peace with England. 
The critical question before Jay, Adams, and Franklin was whether 
or not they should obey their instructions from Congress and refuse 
to conclude a favorable peace with the willing Whig ministry of 
England merely because France wanted to deprive the new republic 
of her western conquests and recompense Spain in the Mississippi 
Valley for what she had failed to get in the West Indies and in the 
Mediterranean, The commissioners, following Jay's advice, dis- 
obeyed Congress, violated the treaty of alliance with France, and con- 
cluded the peace with England alone, thereby securing the whole 
territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. But it took all the tact 
and shrewd suavity of Benjamin Franklin to make the French minis- 
try accept the terms of the treaty with even tolerably good grace. 



THE BIRTH OF THE NATION 129 

154. Terms of the Peace. There were difficult points in the 
negotiations with England too, despite the desire of both sides to 
come to terms. The British ministry readily acknowledged the inde- 
pendence of the United States and made but slight protest against its 
extension westward to the Mississippi. England also conceded to the 
United States the valuable privilege of sharing the Newfoundland 
fisheries. But the questions of debts due to English merchants from 
the colonists before the war, and the treatment of the American 
Loyalists, or Tories, were very troublesome. The American Con- 
gress had no money of its own and had no authority to dispose of 
the funds of the states. It could not, therefore, give the British 
ministry any sufficient guarantee that the debts would be paid. 
John Adams might assure William Pitt with some asperity and in- 
dignation that the Americans had "no idea of cheating anybody," 
but the declaration looked to Pitt remarkably like Mr. Adams's pri- 
vate opinion merely. This matter of the debts might have frustrated 
the peace negotiations entirely, had not the British supplemented the 
American assurances of good will by the secret plan to hold on to the 
valuable fur-trading posts along the Great Lakes from Oswego to 
Mackinac until the debts were paid. 

155. The Problem of the Loyalists. Still more delicate was the 
question of the treatment of the Loyalists. Tens of thousands of the 
American colonists had been opposed to the war with the mother 
country, — some out of prudent anxiety lest the war would entail 
business ruin and general disorder, others from an optimistic be- 
lief that in spite of " Grenville's well-meant blunder and Townshend's 
mahcious challenge" the situation could be "rectified without the 

jdisruption of the Empire." The more ardent of these Loyalists de- 
nounced the Congress in unmeasured terms as a collection of quarrel- 
some, pettifogging lawyers and mechanics ; and when the Declaration 
of Independence put them in the position of traitors, many of them 
entered the British armies. To abandon these allies, who, at the sacri- 
fice of their property and reputation in America, had obeyed King 
George's call to all loyal citizens to aid in putting down rebellion, 
seemed to the British ministry an unpardonable injustice. It thought 
that the American Congress should restore to these Loyalists their 
confiscated estates (valued at some $20,000,000) or reimburse them 
with the territory north of the Ohio, which Clark had conquered. 



130 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

156. The American View of the Tories. But in the breasts of the 
American patriots the thought of the Tories roused bitter memories. It 
was not alone their jibes and insults, their vilification of the character 
of Washington and his associates, their steady encouragement of 
desertion and mutiny in the American army, or their own appearance 
in the uniform of the king's troops. Congress remembered how, in 
the dark winter of 1776, when Washington was vainly imploring the 
farmers of New Jersey for food for his destitute soldiers, the Tory 
squires of the state were selling Lord Howe their rich harvests at 
good prices, to feed the British invaders ; and how in the still darker 
winter that followed, while Washington's starving and shivering army 
at Valley Forge was losing more men by desertion daily than it was 
gaining by recruiting, the Tory drawing-rooms of Philadelphia were 
gay with festivities in honor of the British officers. It was hard that 
the new country, already burdened with a war debt of $50,000,000, 
with its political life to establish on a firm basis and its industries 
and commerce to organize anew, should be asked to recompense 
the men who had done their utmost to wreck the patriot cause, — men 
whom even the careful tongue of Washington called ''detestable 
parricides ! " 

157. The Liberality of England's Terms. The British ministry 
finally accepted the assurance of. the American commissioners that 
Congress would recommend to the states the restitution of the prop- 
erty of such Loyalists as had not borne arms against the United 
States and would put no obstacle in the way of the collection of 
debts due British subjects. The British government itself came to 
the aid of the "active" Loyalists, granting them liberal pensions and 
land in Canada. Europe was amazed at England's generosity. " The 
English buy the peace rather than make it," wrote Vergennes ; '' their 
concessions as to boundaries, the fisheries, the Loyalists, exceed every- 
thing I had thought possible." It was a complete if a tardy triumph 
of that feeling of sympathy for men of common blood, common 
language, traditions, and institutions, across the seas, which had been 
so long struggling to find a voice in the corrupt councils of the 
English court. 

158. The Retirement of Washington. On the eighteenth of April, 
1783, the eighth anniversary of the night when Paul Revere roused 
the minutemen of Lexington to meet the British regulars on the 
village green, Washington proclaimed hostilities at an end ; and, by 



I 




» 




i£ BSB. Sn »! fls lea It* lis l| g _1_ ^:^ 











7i: 



(i(h ''^ul'uSi' — r. 




GROUP OF FAMOUS REVOLUTIONARY BUILDINGS 

Faneuil Hall, Boston ; Old South Church, Boston ; Independence Hall, 
Philadelphia; Old State House, Boston 



132 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

the splendid example of his single-minded patriotism, persuaded men 
and officers to go to their homes " without a farthing in their pockets," 
confident in the power and good will of their new government to 
reward them according to their deserts. The final articles of peace 
were signed September 3, 1783. On November 25 the last British 
regulars in America sailed out of New York harbor, and a few days 
later Washington bade his officers an affectionate farewell and retired 
to his home at Mount Vernon, there, as he hoped, " to glide gently 
down the stream of time until he rested with his fathers." 

References 

The Declaration of Independence: C. H. Van Tyne, The American Revo- 
lution (Am. Nation), chaps, iv-vi; John Fiske, The American Revolution, 
Vol. I, chap, iv; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, 
Vol. VI, chap, iii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, chap, vi; G. Otto 
Trevelyan, The American Revolution, Vol. II, Part I, pp. 105-158; Edward 
Channing, History of the United States, Vol. Ill, chap, vii; E. M. Avery, History 
of the United States and its People, Vol. V, chap, xxii; J. H. Hazelton, The 
Declaration of Independence; A. B. Hart, American History told by Con- 
temporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 184-188. 

The Revolutionary War: S. G. Fisher, The Struggle for American Inde- 
pendence; Channing, Vol. Ill, chaps, viii-xi; Avery, Vol. V, chaps x, xiv-xxi; 
Vol. VI, chaps, i-xiv; Van Tyne, chaps, vii-xvii; Trevelyan, Vols. I-III (to 
1777) ; -Fiske, Vols. I, II; W. M. Sloane, The French War and the Revolution, 
chaps, xx-xxviii; Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vols. II, III; 
H. C. Lodge, The Story of the Revolution; G. M. Wrong, Washington and 
his Comrades in Arms (Chronicles, Vol. XII) ; William H. English, The 
Conquest of the Country Northwest of the Ohio; W. H. Lecky, History of 
England in the Eighteenth Century (ed. Woodburn), chap, ii; Old South 
Leaflets, Vol. IV, Nos. 5, 97, 98; G. S. Cullender, Economic History of the 
United States, chap. iv. 

Peace: John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, chap, i; 
A. C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution (Am. Nation), 
chaps, i-iii; Channing, Vol. Ill, chap, xii; Avery, Vol. VI, chaps, xv-xvii; 
Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 215-220; Lecky (ed. Woodburn), chap, iv; Winsor, 
Vol. VII, chap, ii; William MacDonald, Select Documents of United States 
History, 1776-1861, No. 3 (for text of treaty). 

Topics for Special Reports 

I. Thomas Paine's Contribution to American Independence: Trevelyan, 
Vol. II, Part I, pp. 147-155; Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 159, 186; Van Tyne, 
pp. 61-65, 129; M. C. Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, 
Vol. I, pp. 452-471 ; M. D. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine (use index). 




LAFAYETTE 



From a miniature portrait by La Perche, Courtesy of the Museum 

of Fine Arts, Boston 



134 SEPARATION OF THE COLONIES FROM ENGLAND 

2. Lafayette in the American Revolution: Old South Leaflets, Nos. 97, 
98; FiSKE, The American Revolution, VoL II, pp. 43-46, 202-205, 231-233, 
268-280 (Riverside Edition) ; Sloane, pp. 264, 292, 324-344. 

3. The Tories: Tyler, Vol. I, pp. 293-383; Trevelyan, Vol. II, Part II, 
pp. 226-240; Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 166-169; Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the 
American Revolution, pp. 1-59; Tyler, The Party of the Loyalists {American 
Historical Review, Vol. I, pp. 24 fl".). 

4. Daniel Boone, a Pioneer to the West: A. B. Hurlburt, Boone's Wil- 
derness Road, pp. 1-47; H. A. Bruce, The Romance of American Expansion, 
pp. 1-24; Roosevelt, Vol. I, pp. 134-136; J. R. Spears, The History of the 
Mississippi Valley, pp. 183-208; R. G. Thw^aites, Life of Daniel Boone. 

5. Washington's Trials with the Army and Congress: Fiske, The 
American Revolution, Vol. II, pp. 24-46, 62-72 ; The Critical Period of 
American History, pp. 101-119; Hart, Vol. II, Nos. 174, 195, 198, 206; 
Sloane, pp. 370-378; Van Tyne, The American Revolution, pp. 236-247; 
Old South Leaflets, No. 47. 



PART III. THE NEW REPUBLIC * 

CHAPTER VI 

THE CONSTITUTION 

The Critical Period 

159. The End of the Colonial Period. With the Revolutionary 
War the first great epoch of American history, the colonial period, came 
to an end. The English colonies became an independent nation, and 
the political connections with the great British Empire were severed. 
Royal governors, councilors, judges, customs officers, and agents dis- 
appeared, and their places were taken by men chosen by the people 
of the new states, — public servants instead of public masters. For- 
tunately the break with Great Britain had not come before the 
serious and aggressive French rivals of the English in the New World 
had been subdued, and the country from the Atlantic to the Missis- 
sippi had been won for men of English speech, blood, tradition, and 
law. Two great facts, the separation of the colonies from England 
and the possession of a vast western territory to be settled 
and organized, determined the chief activities of the new republic. 
First of all, the United States, unless that name were to be a mere 
mockery, must devise a form of government to insure a national 
union ; and, in the second place, the national government must be 
extended westward as the new domain beyond the mountains de- 
veloped. We have studied the winning of American Independence. 
We turn now to a study of the American Union. 

160. The Nature and Authority of Congress. Thirteen years 
elapsed between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the 
inauguration of George Washington as first president of the United 
States (1789). During those years our country was governed by a 
Congress, a group of delegates comprising from two to seven members 
from each state. Until a few months before the surrender of Corn- 
wallis at Yorktown this Congress was without legal authority, or any 

135 



136 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

written constitution defining its powers. Its members, acting on in- 
structions from their states, or relying on the indorsement of their 
states, assumed very important functions of government. They 
raised and officered an army, assessed the states for its support, de- 
clared the colonies independent of England, borrowed money abroad 
on the credit of the new United States, rejected the British offer of 
reconciliation in 1778, and concluded treaties of commerce and alliance 
with France. But the Continental Congress could assume these vast 
powers of government without express authority only because the 
pressure of war united the colonies for the moment and made a cen- 
tral directing body an immediate necessity. For the Union to endure 
after the pressure of war was over, a regular national government had 
to be established. 

161. The Articles of Confederation. About a year before the 
colonies declared their independence Benjamin Franklin, a lifelong 
advocate of colonial union, submitted to this Congress a draft of 
"Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union" (July 21, 1775). 
But too many of the members of Congress still hoped for a peaceful 
settlement with England to make this plan acceptable. When inde- 
pendence was declared, however, the necessity of forming a govern- 
ment became obvious. A committee of thirteen, with John Dickinson 
of Pennsylvania as chairman, prepared Articles of Confederation, 
which were approved by Congress in November, 1777. But more 
than three years elapsed before the last of the states, Maryland, 
assented to the Articles and so made them the law of the land 
(March i, 1781). 

162. The Cession of Western Lands by the States. The 
delay of Maryland in accepting the Articles of Confederation was 
due to an important cause and resulted in a great benefit to the 
nation. The states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North 
and South Carolina, and Georgia claimed land between the Alle- 
ghenies and the Mississippi by virtue of their old colonial charters, 
which gave them indefinite westward extension. Virginia's claim, which 
overlapped that of both Massachusetts and Connecticut, was strength- 
ened by the fact that George Rogers Clark had actually conquered 
the vast territory north of the Ohio under commission from the 
governor of Virginia. New York also maintained a claim to part 
of the same disputed territory on account of a treaty with the 



THE CONSTITUTION 137 

Iroquois Indians, which had put those tribes under her protection 
(1768). The states whose western boundaries were fixed by their 
charters, like Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, were at a 
disadvantage, since they had no Western lands with which to reward 
their veterans of the Revolution. Maryland, therefore, insisted, be- 
fore accepting the Articles of Confederation, that the states with 
Western claims should surrender them to the United States, and 
that all the land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi should 
be national domain. After some parleying, New York, in 1781, led 
the way in surrendering its claims. Virginia, with noble generosity, 
gave up her far better founded claims to the whole region north of 
the Ohio, in 1784. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Carolinas 
soon followed suit, although Georgia, partly on account of compli- 
cations with Spain, maintained her claims as far west as the Missis- 
sippi until 1802. By these cessions the United States acquired an 
immense national domain (see map, p. 126), the sale of which could 
be applied to the payment of the Revolutionary War debt and from 
whose territory new states could be formed. It was the beginning 
of a truly national power, and honor is due to the state of Maryland 
for insisting on this fair and wise policy. 

163. Criticism of the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of 
Confederation, though announcing a " perpetual union " and a '^ firm 
league of friendship " of the thirteen states, remained in force only 
eight years and failed utterly to bring strength or harmony into the 
Union. They had some merits, to be sure. They were the first defi- 
nite formulation of a national government, in black on white, and 
the powers which they gave to Congress, had they only included the 
control of commerce and taxation, would have been ample to run the 
government. But the defects of the Articles may be summed up 
in a single clause : they failed to give the Congress of the United 
States enough authority to carry out the powers granted to it. 
At the very outset they declared that ^'each state retained its 
sovereignty, freedom, and independence," and all through them the 
unwillingness to force the states to part with any of their power 
is evident. For example, Congress pledged the faith of the United 
States to pay the war debt, yet it had neither the power to de- 
mand, nor the machinery to collect, a single penny from any citi- 
zen or state of the Union. It could only make ''requisitions" on the 



138 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

states, and its repeated requests for money met with meager response. 
Gouverneur Morris called it a "government by supplication," The 
budget for 1 781-1782 was $9,000,000. Of this, Congress negotiated 
for $4,000,000 by a foreign loan and assessed the states for the 
other $5,000,000. After a year's delay some $450,000 of the 
$5,000,000 asked for was paid in, and not a dollar came from 
Georgia, South Carolina, or Delaware. So, from year to year, the 
" government by supplication " worried along, asking millions and get- 
ting a few hundred thousands, in imminent danger of going bankrupt 
by failing to pay the interest on its debt, with scarcely enough 
revenue, as one statesman said with pardonable exaggeration, " to 
buy stationery for its clerks or pay the salar}'^ of a doorkeeper." The 
impotence of Congress in financial matters was only one example of 
the general inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation. They put 
on the central government certain grave responsibilities, such as de- 
fending the land from its foes, maintaining its credit, preserving 
order at home, and securing friendships abroad ; and yet they gave 
the central government no means of enforcing obedience to its will. 
Congress had no executive power, no national courts of justice in 
which to condemn offenders against its laws, no control of com- 
merce, no machinery of taxation, no check on the indiscriminate 
issue by the states of money of differing values, no efficient army 
or navy. 

164. Our Government despised by the European Powers. It 
is no wonder that so weak a government failed to inspire respect 
abroad or obedience at home. England, in defiance of the treaty of 
1783, still held the fur-trading posts of the Northwest and, confident 
that the thirteen states would not unite in a policy of retaliation, shut 
us out from the lucrative trade with her West Indies. The French 
ministers told Jefferson plainly in Paris that it was impossible to 
recognize the Congress as a government. The Spanish governor at 
New Orleans offered the Western frontiersmen the use of the Missis- 
sippi if they would renounce their allegiance to the United States 
and come under the flag of Spain. The thrifty merchants of Amster- 
dam were on tenterhooks for fear that the interest on their loans to 
the new republic would not be paid. And finally even the Moham- 
medan pirates of the Barbary States in northern Africa levied black- 
mail on our vessels which ventured into the Mediterranean. The 



THE CONSTITUTION 139 

government under the Articles of Confederation "had touched that 
lowest point of ignominy where it confessed its inability to protect 
the lives and property of its citizens." 

165. The Threat of Anarchy at Home. At home anarchy was 
imminent. The glowing sentences in which patriots on the eve of 
the Revolution had declared themselves no longer Virginians or 
Carolinians, but henceforth Americans, were forgotten when peace 
was made. The states, with their conflicting commercial and agri- 
cultural interests, their diverse social and religious inheritances from 
early colonial days, their strong sense of local independence, nurtured 
by long defense against British officials and strengthened by the 
meagerness of intercolonial trade and travel, were jealous to preserve 
their individuality unimpaired. They indulged in petty tariff wars 
against one another, the defeated party often seeking a spiteful 
consolation in refusing to pay its contribution to Congress. Bound- 
ary disputes were frequent and fierce. The farmers of New York 
and New Hampshire fought over the region of Vermont like bands of 
Indians on the warpath, "with all the horrors of ambuscade and 
arson " ; Pennsylvania allowed the Indians of the Wyoming valley 
to scalp New Englanders as "intruders." Congress was powerless 
to prevent states from plunging into the folly of issuing large sums 
of paper money to ease the debtor class. It looked on in distressed 
impotence while thriving towns like Newport were brought to the 
edge of ruin by wild financial legislation,^ and the ancient and digni- 
fied commonwealth of Massachusetts had to subdue an armed mob 
of 1500 rebels of the debtor class, led by a captain of the Revolution 
named Daniel Shays, who closed the courts at Worcester and attacked 
the United States arsenal at Springfield (i 786-1 787). 

166. The Apathy of Congress. As the weakness of Congress be- 
came more evident its dignity declined. The foremost statesmen 
preferred to serve their own states rather than to sit in a national 
assembly without power. Each state was entitled to seven repre- 
sentatives in Congress by the terms of the Articles, making a house 
of ninety-one members. But there were seldom more than a quarter 

1 A French visitor to America during this distressing period saw in Newport " groups of 
idle men standing with folded arms at the comers of the streets, houses falling to ruin, 
miserable shops with nothing but a few coarse stuffs, grass growing in the public square in 
front of the court of justice, and rags stuffed in the windows or hung on hideous women " 
(Brissot de Warville, Travels in America, Ed. of 1791, p. 145). 



140 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

of that number in attendance. Some states went unrepresented for 
months at a time. Only twenty members were in session to receive 
George Washington and to express to him the country's gratitude 
for his invaluable services on the most solemn occasion of his sur- 
render of the command of the American army in December, 1783. 
Only twenty-three assembled the next month to ratify the treaty of 
peace with England. Finally, the attendance dwindled away to a 
few scattering representatives, until from October, 1788, to April, 
1789, not enough members assembled to make a quorum, and there 
was absolutely no United States government. 

167. The Northwest Ordinance. It is a relief to be able to point 
to one piece of statesmanlike and constructive work done by the poor 
tottering government of the Confederation in these dismal years, 
fitly called " the critical period of American history." The large 
domain between the Great Lakes and the Ohio, which had become the 
property of the United States by the abandonment of the claims of 
the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, 
was organized by Congress into the Northwest Territory, July 13, 
1787. The act of organization, called the Northwest Ordinance, 
placed the territory under a governor and three judges until the 
population should be large enough for real representative government. 
It also provided that the citizens of the territory should enjoy com- 
plete political and religious liberty, that a system of free public 
education should be introduced, that eventually from three to five 
new states should be carved out of the territory, and that slavery 
should forever be excluded from the domain.^ Within a year colonists 
from Massachusetts, sent out by the Ohio Company, founded the 
town of Marietta in what is now southern Ohio, and, with the estab- 
lishment of county government and courts, the Northwest Ordinance 
was put into operation (April, 1788). As the first law for the govern- 
ment of national territory, this ordinance declared that the extension 
of the power of the United States into the Western wilderness was 
to be at the same time the extension of the blessings of enlighten- 
ment, tolerance, and freedom. Daniel Webster, in a speech in the 

1 This territory was essentially the same as that reserved in Vergennes's plan of 1782 for 
further negotiations between England and the United States (see map, opposite p. 128). 
Out of it were formed later the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, 
with a small piece of Minnesota. 



THE CONSTITUTION 141 

United States Senate forty years later, said, "I doubt whether any 
single law of any lawgiver ancient or modern has produced effects of |l 
more distinct and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787." 



"A More Perfect Union" 

168. Proposals for a Stronger Government. The inadequacy 
of the Articles of Confederation was recognized from the beginning 
by some of the wisest of our statesmen. These Articles had been in 
operation (if one can speak of their ''operating" at all) little mere 
than a month when James Madison of Virginia proposed (April, 
1 781) that they should be amended so as to give the United States 
'' full authority to employ force by sea as well as by land to compel 
any delinquent state to fulfill its federal obligations," or, in other 
words, to pay its share of the federal assessment. After the peace 
with England, two years later, Washington wrote in a circular letter 
to the governors of the states, "There should be lodged somewhere 
a supreme power to regulate the general concerns of the Confederated 
Republic, without which this Union cannot be of long duration." 
Again in 1784, he wrote, "I predict the worst consequences for a 
half-starved limping government, always moving on crutches, and 
tottering at every step." Finally, Congress itself officially proclaimed 
its inability to conduct the government under its meager powers, by 
supporting a proposal for a convention of delegates from all the 
states to revise the Articles of Confederation. 

169. The Mount Vernon and Annapolis Conventions. The pro- 
posal had arisen cut of an economic difficulty. Maryland and Vir- 
ginia disputed the control of the Potomac River, and commissioners 
from these two states met as guests of Washington at Mount Ver- 
non, in 1785, to settle the matter. In the course of the discussion 
it developed that the commercial interests of Pennsylvania and Dela- 
ware were also concerned, and the Virginia commissioners suggested 
that all the states be invited to send delegates to a convention at 
Annapolis, Maryland, the next year, to consider the commercial in- 
terests of the United States as a whole. But no sooner had the dele- 
gates of five states met at Annapolis in 1786 than they took a further 
important step. The New Jersey delegation had brought instruc- 
tions to discuss the commercial question and other important matters. 



142 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

Alexander Hamilton of New York, impressed by this phrase, pro- 
posed that still another convention of all the states be called at 
Philadelphia the next year for the general revision of the Articles 
of Confederation. Even before Congress sanctioned this proposal six 
of the states had appointed delegates, and after the approval of Con- 
gress was given six more states fell into line. Only little Rhode 
Island, fearing that her commerce would be ruined by national con- 
trol and her representation overshadowed by the larger states in 
Congress, refused to send delegates to the convention. 

170. The Constitutional Convention. It was an extraordinary 
array of political talent that was brought together in the convention 
which met in Independence Hall at Philadelphia in May, 1787, to 
devise a worthy government for the United States. John Adams and 
Thomas Jefferson were in Europe, as ministers to the courts of Eng- 
land and France respectively. John Jay was foreign secretary in 
Congress, and Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, the foremost agita- 
tors of the American Revolution, were both opposed to strengthening 
the central government. But with these five exceptions the greatest 
men of the country were at the Philadelphia convention : Washing- 
ton, Madison, Randolph, and Mason from Virginia ; Franklin, Wil- 
son, Robert and Gouverneur Morris from Pennsylvania ; Roger 
Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth from Connecticut ; Elbridge Gerrj'' 
and Rufus King from Massachusetts ; John Rutledge and Charles 
Pinckney from South Carolina ; John Dickinson from Delaware ; and 
Alexander Hamilton from New York. Washington was chosen presi- 
dent of the Convention. The sessions, which lasted from May 25 to 
September 17, were secret; but the methodical Madison took full 
notes of the debates, writing them out carefully every evening in the 
form of a journal. When he died fifty years later, — the last survivor 
of that remarkable gathering of men, — his widow sold the manu- 
script of this valuable journal, with other important Madison papers, 
to Congress for $30,000, and the journal was published at Washing- 
ton in 1840. 

171. The Virginia and New Jersey Plans. The Convention pro- 
ceeded to give a very liberal interpretation to its instructions to 
" amend " the Articles of Confederation. The Virginia delegation 
brought in a plan for the entire remodeling of the government. There 
were to be three independent departments, — the legislative, the 



THE CONSTITUTION 143 

executive, and the judicial. The legislature was to consist of a House 
of Representatives elected by the people and a Senate elected by the 
House. The government, therefore, was to be national, deriving its 
power directly from the people of the nation at large, rather than 
a confederation, depending for its existence on the will of the various 
state legislatures. The small states, fearing that they would lose 
their individuality entirely in a national legislature elected in pro- 
portion to the population, supported a counter plan introduced by 
Governor Paterson of New Jersey. The New Jersey plan proposed 
to amend the Articles of Confederation, as did the Virginia plan, 
by the creation of executive and judicial departments and by giving 
l\ Congress control of commerce and power to raise taxes. But the 
representatives in Congress were still to be representatives of the 
states and not of the people of the nation, and each state, large or 
small, was to have an equal number of delegates. In short, the 
existing confederation was to be perpetuated, with increased powers, 
to be sure, but still without the strength of a true national federation. 

172. The Extremists. Then there were extremists on both sides. 
Some delegates, interpreting their instructions to "amend" the 
Articles very literally, left the Convention and went home when they 
saw that it was the intention of the members to change the nature 
of the government. On the other hand, Alexander Hamilton advo- 
cated a government in which the chief executive and the senators 
should hold office for life (like the English king and lords) and in 
which the executive should have power not only of vetoing state 
laws, as suggested in the Virginia plan, but also of appointing and 
removing the governors of the states, thus reducing the states to 
mere administrative departments of the national government, like the 
shires in England or the departments in France. 

173. The "Great Compromise." The extremists found little fol- 
lowing, however, in the Convention. The real struggle was between 
the Virginia and the New Jersey plan ; that is, between a national 
federation and a mere confederacy of states. And on this question 
the Convention threatened to go to pieces, one party declaring that 
they would never consent to a government in which their states 
should be swallowed up, and the other with equal fervor declaring 
that they would not support a government in which the will of a 
large majority of the people of the United States could be thwarted 



144 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

by the selfish action of one or two small states, as it had been under 
the Articles of Confederation. Only the tact, patience, and persua- 
sion of a few veteran statesmen like Benjamin Franklin, John Dickin- 
son, and Roger Sherman, and the incomparable political wisdom and 
diligence in debate of James Madison, " the Father of the Constitu- 
tion," finally succeeded in bringing about a series of compromises. 
The most important of these was on the form of the government. 
The states, large and small, were to preserve their equality of repre- 
sentation in the upper House of Congress (the Senate), while the 
members of the lower House (the House of Representatives) were to 
be elected by the people of the states, each state having a number of 
representatives in proportion to its population. As representatives 
of the people, the members of the lower House were to have control 
of the public purse, with the sole right to initiate legislation for the 
raising of revenue (taxation). 

174. Further Compromises in the Constitution. When the great 
question of the general character of our government was settled by 
this first compromise, the other points of difference, most of which 
concerned the conflicting interests of the North and the South, were 
more easily adjusted. The Southern states demanded that their 

! slaves (though they were not citizens) should be counted as popula- 
tion in the apportionment of representatives in Congress, that Con- 
gress should not interfere with the slave trade, and that a two-thirds 
vote of the House of Representatives should be necessary for passing 
tariff laws. Compromises were arrived at on all these questions. 
Three fifths of the slaves were to be included in making up the 
apportionment for Congress, so that a state with 100,000 white in- 
habitants and 50,000 slaves would be reckoned as having a popu- 
lation of 130,000. Congress was not to disturb the slave trade for 
twenty years, though it might levy a tax not exceeding ten dollars 

-~ct~liead on slaves imported into the states. Finally, tariff laws were 
to be passed by a simple majority vote in the House, but no duties 
were to be levied on exports. 

175. The Ratification of the Constitution. The Convention, 
after voting that the new Constitution should go into effect as soon 
as nine states had accepted it, sent the document to Congress, and 
Congress transmitted it to the several states for ratification. Dela- 
ware was the first to ratify the new Constitution, by a unanimous 



THE CONSTITUTION 



145 



vote, December 7, 1787. By the twenty-first of the following June 
eight other states had ratified in the following order : Pennsylvania, 
New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South 
Carolina, New Hampshire ; and the Constitution thereupon became 
the supreme law for those states. Virginia and New York followed 
soon, ratifying by very narrow margins after bitter struggles in their 
coriventions. North Carolina did not come under ^^ the federal roof " 
until November, 1789, after Washington had been president for over 
six months. Rhode Island did not even send any delegates to the 
Constitutional Convention, and did not call any convention in the 

The Ninth PILLAR erected ! 

"The Ratification of theConventionsof nine States, fiiall be fuffitient fortheelUbJilh- 
ment of this Conftitution, between the Slates lo ratif^-ing the fame" Art. vii. 

INCIPIENT MJGNI PROCEDERE MENSES. 

^UilisDOlvpger^S^ Th« Alfriclion muft 
be irrsWlitle 




THE PROGRESS OF RATIFICATION 

From an Old Chronicle 



state to consider ratifying the Constitution, until the new Congress 
threatened to treat the state as a foreign nation and levy tariff duties 
on her commerce with the other states. Then she came to terms and 
entered the Union, May 29, 1790. 

Some of the states (Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia) ratified the 
Constitution unanimously, but in others (Massachusetts, Virginia, 
Pennsylvania, New York) there was a severe struggle. A change of 
ID votes in the Massachusetts convention of 355 members, or of 6 
votes in the Virginia convention of 168, or of 2 votes in the New 
York convention of 57 would have defeated the Constitution in 
these states. In Pennsylvania it seemed as though the days of the 
Stamp Act had returned. There was rioting and burning in effigy, 
and a war of brickbats as well as of pamphlets. The narrow victory 
in New York was won only through the tireless advocacy of Alex- 
ander Hamilton, who loyally supported the Constitution, although, 



146 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

as we have seen, it did not satisfy him in some important respects. 
He made the campaign one of splendid political education through 
the anonymous publication (with the help of Madison and Jay) of 
a most remarkable set of essays called '' The Federalist," explaining 
the nature of the new Constitution. In Virginia and Massachusetts 
such patriots as Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, 
Elbridge Gerry, and John Hancock opposed the Constitution on the 
ground of its infringement on the powers of the states. Many of 
the farmer and debtor classes opposed it because of the unlimited 
power of taxation it gave to the central government. But when the 
ratification was finally assured, the American public forgot their 
differences and went wild with joy. Dinners, processions, illumina- 
tions, jollifications of every sort, followed each other in bewildering 
succession. Allegory was called to the aid of sober history. ''The 
sloop Anarchy," declared one journal, " has gone ashore on the Union 
rock " ; another said that " the old scow Confederacy, Imbecility 
master, had gone off to sea." '' Federal punch" was a favorite brew 
in the taverns; "federal hats" were advertised in the shops; and 
"federal tobacco mixture" was smoked in patriot pipes. 

176. The Constitution a Wonderful Achievement. By the adop- 
tion of the Constitution of the United States our country passed, 
without civil revolution or a military dictatorship, from anarchy to 
order, from weakness to strength, from death to life. Count Alexis 
de Tocqueville, our distinguished French visitor in 1833, and one of 
the keenest observers of our democratic institutions, wrote of this 
achievement : " It is new in the history of society to see a great 
people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprized 
. . . that the wheels of its government are stopped ; to see it care- 
fully examine the extent of the evil and patiently wait two whole 
years until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submits 
without its costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind." 

The Federal Power ^ 

177. The Constitution contrasted with the Articles of Con- 
federation. This is the place to pause for a brief study of the won- 
derful instrument of government under which the United States has 

1 The text of the Constitution of the 'United States (Appendix II) should be carefully 
studied in connection with this section, which is virtually a commentary on it. 




o 

H 

HI 

w 
W 

H 



THE CONSTITUTION 147 

lived for over a century and a quarter, and increased from a seaboard 
community of 4,000,000 to a continental nation numbering over 
100,000,000. In contrast to the old government under the Articles 
of Confederation, the new Constitution was framed as a government^ 
"of the people, by the people, and for the people" of the United 
States. Whereas the members of the old Congress were appointed 
by their respective state legislatures, by whom they were recalled 
at pleasure, the members of the new House of Representatives, elected 
by. the voters in congressional districts in every state, were to be 
servants of the nation, paid from its treasury to make laws for the 
gcod of the whole land. Whereas the president of the old Congress 
haa been simply its presiding officer or moderator, the president of 
the United States under the new Constitution was given powers for 
the execution of the laws made by Congress, — ^ powers extending 
into every corner of the land and greater than those enjoyed by most 
constitutional monarchs. And finally, whereas the old Congress pro- 
vided for no permanent court to pronounce on the validity of its 
own laws or settle disputes at law between the various states, -the 
new Constitution established a Supreme Court of the United States 
and gave Congress power to establish inferior national (or federal) 
' courts throughout the Union. 

178. The Three Departments of Government. The creation of 
these three independent departments of legislative, executive, and 
judicial power, reaching every citizen in every part of the land, 
was the fundamental achievement of the framers of the Constitution. 
The idea of the threefold division of power was not a new one, for 
the governments of the colonies had all consisted of lawmaking as- 
semblies elected by the people, an executive appointed (except in 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) by king or proprietor, 
and courts of justice from which there was final appeal to the Privy 
Council of the king. But the task of adopting this triple plan of 
^vernment on a national scale, while still preserving the individuality 
and even to a large extent the independence of the states, was a very 
difficult and delicate one. 

179. The Legislative Department (Congress). The legislative 
department of our government is described in Article I of the Con- 
stitution, where the qualifications, length of term, method of elec- 
tion, duties and powers of the rnembers of both Houses of Congress, 
are prescribed. The number of senators in every Congress is just 



148 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

twice the number of states in the Union, but the size of the House 
of Representatives is altered every ten years when a new census 
of the United States is taken. Congress then makes a new ratio of 
representation and a new apportionment of congressional districts for 
each state, according to its population. The present House (1920) 
contains 435 members, one for about every 212,000 of population. 
If the original ratio of i to 30,000 had been kept, the House would 
now contain about 2800 members.^ In order to become laws of the 
United States all bills introduced into Congress have to pass both 
Houses and receive the president's signature. If the president vetoes 
a bill it still becomes a law if, on reconsideration, both Houses 
pass it by a two-thirds majority. If Congress passes a law which is 
not within its authority as granted by the Constitution (Art. I, 
sect. 8), the Supreme Court of the United States, when appealed to 
in any case to test that law, has the right and duty to declare the 
law void. The subjects on which Congress may legislate naturally 
include all those which concern the dignity and credit of the nation 
in the eyes of foreign powers, and its peace and security at home, 
namely : the regulation of commerce with foreign nations and be- 
tween the states ; the declaration of war and the direction of the 
military and naval forces of the country ; the regulation of the cur- 
rency and coinage ; the control of territories and public lands ; the 
care of the Indians, of rivers and harbors, lighthouses, coast survey, 
and all that pertains to shipping and defense. Moreover, the states 
are forbidden to exercise certain powers of sovereignty delegated to 
the national Congress. No state can make alliances, go to war, coin 
money, lay taxes on the commerce of another state, or make any- 
thing but gold and silver legal tender (lawful money) for the pay- 
ment of debts. 

180. The Powers left to the States. However, after deducting 
the powers delegated to Congress or expressly denied to the states, 
the latter have an immense field for legislation. All those things 
which especially interest the average citizen are affairs of the state 
government, namely : the protection of life and property ; laws 
of marriage and inheritance ; the chartering and control of business 

^ In the first House New York was allotted 6 representatives, Pennsylvania and Massa« 
chusetts 8 each, and Virginia lo. By the census of 1910 New York has 43 representatives, 
Pennsylvania 36, Massachusetts 16, and Virginia 10.. 



THE CONSTITUTION 149 

corporations, state banks, insurance and trust companies ; the defini- 
tion and punishment of crimes ; the establishment of systems of pub- 
lic education ; the creation of city, county, and town governments ; 
and a host of other powers, political, moral, and social. Sometimes 
the field of jurisdiction between the national and the state power is 
hard to distinguish, but the decision of the Supreme Court is final in 
determining both the limits of the federal authority and the interpre- 
tation of the Constitution. 

181. The Executive Department. The duty of putting into 
effect the laws of Congress is intrusted to the executive department 
of our government. Theoretically, the whole of this immense task 
falls on the president alone, who " shall take care that the laws be 
faithfully executed." Actually no man could do a hundredth part of 
the work of executing the thousands of laws which Congress passes 
every session. To collect the duties and excises which Congress 
lays ; to coin the money which it authorizes ; to print and sell the 
bonds it issues ; to command the armies it raises ; to build and man 
the warships it votes ; to appoint judges for the courts it erects ; to 
handle the business of the post office ; to carry into effect its agree- 
ments, political and economic, with the nations of the world ; to 
govern its territories and dependencies in America, the West Indies, 
and the Pacific — all this calls for the labors of tens of thousands of 
secretaries, undersecretaries, and clerks in the various executive 
departments at Washington, and a host of federal officials in our sea- 
ports, our dockyards, our forts and arsenals, our islands and ter- 
ritories, and the capitals and chief commercial centers of foreign 
countries. 

182. The Cabinet. Ten great executive departments have been 
created by Congress to perform these varied duties.^ Every presi- 
dent, on coming into office, chooses the heads of these departments, 
and these ten secretaries form the president's "official family," or 

1 At the inauguration of the federal government there were but four departments : 
namely, State (Foreign Affairs), Treasury, War, and the Post Office. The following depart- 
ments have been added as the business of government required them : Navy (1798), Interior 
(1849), Justice [the Attorney-General's department] (1870), Agriculture (18S9), Commerce 
and Labor (1903), made into two separate departments (1913). The Attorney-General, or 
legal adviser of the president and prosecutor of suits brought by the United States, was a 
member of the president's cabinet from the inauguration of the government. On the other 
hand, though the Post-Office Department was organized in the colonial days, its head (the 
Postmaster-General) was not made a member of the cabinet until 1829. 



150 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

cabinet. They are lieutenants of the ^president only, responsible to 
him alone, though they may be removed by the Senate if impeached 
and found guilty (Art. I, sect. 2, par. 5 ; Art. I, sect. 3, pars. 6, 7). 
Cabinet officers are not members of Congress (as ministers in Eu- 
rope are), nor have they access to the floor of Congress. The presi- 
dent consults them in regular cabinet meetings as to the affairs of 
their departments, and, acting on their knowledge and advice, com- 
municates with Congress by an annual message when the Houses 
assemble on the first Monday of each December, and by as many 
special messages during the session as he sees fit to send. Congress 
does not recognize the cabinet, but only the president. Laws on 
every subject go to him, not to the heads of departments, for signa- 
ture. Appointments to executive and judicial offices, needing the 
consent of the Senate, are sent to that body not by the secretaries 
but by the president. He is the only executive officer recognized by 
the Constitution. 

183. The Choice of a President. It was the intention of the fram- 
ers of the Constitution to have the president, the most important 
servant of the government of the United States, chosen by a selected 
body of judicious men called '' electors." Every state should choose, 
in the manner prescribed by its legislature, a number of men equal 
to that state's representation in Congress. The men so chosen were 
to assemble and vote for president and vice president,^ Thus our 
chief executive was actually to be selected and elected by a small, 
carefully chosen body of men in each state. But the statesmen who 
planned this calm, judicious method of selecting a president did not 
foresee the intense party feeling that was to develop in the United 
States even before George Washington was out of the presidential 
chair. The party leaders began at once to select the candidates for 
president and vice president and have done so ever since." The 
voters in each state still continue to cast their votes for presidential 

1 At first the electors did not vote for president and vice president separately, but 
simply marked two names on their ballots. The man who received the highest number of 
votes (if a majority of the whole number) became president, and the man with the next 
highest number vice president. Since this method of choice resulted in an embarrassing 
tie in the election of iSoo, the Constitution was amended (Amendment XII) in 1S04, so as 
to have each elector vote specifically for president and vice president. 

2 In the early years of the republic the candidates were selected by party caucuses in 
Congress or by the indorsement of the various state legislatures. About 1S30 the national 
party " machines " were organized, and from that time great national conventions, engineered 
by these party machines, have met several months before each presidential election to 
nominate the candidates. 



THE CONSTITUTION 151 

electors, but these electors do not choose the president. They simply 
register the vote of their state. In other words, each state, in choos- 
ing Republican or Democratic electors, simply instructs those electors 
to vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate who has been 
nominated months before by the national convention of the party. 
As soon, therefore, as the electors are voted for, in November, it is 
known which candidate has been elected president, without waiting 
for those electors to meet and cast their ballots the following January. 

184. The Judicial Department. The judicial department of our 
government is the hardest to understand, because of the variety of 
courts and the double jurisdiction of national and state tribunals. 
Every citizen of the United States lives under two systems of law, 
national and state. For violation of national laws (the laws of Con- 
gress) he is tried in the federal (or national) courts ; for violation 
of state laws he is tried in the state courts. The highest court in 
our judicial system is the United States Supreme Court, sitting at 
Washington, composed of a chief justice and eight associate justices, 
all appointed for life by the president, with the consent of the 
Senate, and removable only by the process of impeachment. This 
most dignified body in our government is invested with enor- 
mous power. Its decision is final in all cases brought to it by appeal 
from state or federal courts throughout the land.^ It is the official 
interpreter and guardian of the Constitution. It has sole jurisdiction 
in cases affecting foreign ambassadors or ministers, and in cases be- 
tween two states or between a state and the United States. But 
any case between corporations or individuals involving the interpreta- 
tion of a clause of the Constitution may be appealed from the lower 
courts to its jurisdiction, and in the decision of such a case it has 
the right to nullify or declare void any law of Congress or of a state 
that it finds violating the Constitution. . 

185. The "Unwritten Laws" of the Constitution. There are 
many important features in the actual conduct of the government of 
the United States which are not mentioned in the Constitution at 
all. The president's cabinet, the national nominating conventions, 
afid the instruction of electors to vote for the party's nominee for 

1 Congress has established federal courts in ever)' state of the Union ; and all the federal 
judges (now about one hundred in number) are appointed for life by the president, with the 
consent of the Senate. The judges of the state courts are either appointed by the governor 
(in a few of the older states) or elected by the people or the legislature for a term varying 
from two to twenty-one years. 



152 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

president are examples that we have already noticed. Other customs 
which amount almost to "unwritten laws" of the Constitution are 
( I ) the limitation of the president's office to two terms, an example 
set by Washington and never yet departed from; (2) "senatorial 
courtesy," which expects the president to follow the recommenda- 
tion of the United States senators of his party in making federal ap- 
pointments (judges, marshals, collectors of customs, important post- 
masters) in their respective states ; (3) the power of the Speaker of 
the House of Representatives, who, by his influence in the choice of 
the committees and by " recognizing " on the floor of the House only 
such debaters as he chooses to, can exert considerable control over 
the legislation of Congress ; (4) the transaction of practically all the 
business of Congress in committee rooms. - Jii_its earlier days Con-_ 
gress was a hall of debate in which national issues were threshed out 
by the greatest orators of the nation ; but since the Civil War it has 
tended to become scarcely more than a great voting machine, run by 
the party in power. Few Americans have been in the habit of fol- 
lowing the daily business of Congress as Englishmen follow the 
debates of their Parliament. 

186. The Bill of Rights. Several of the states, notably Massa- 
chusetts, accepted the Constitution with the recommendation that 
amendments be added guaranteeing certain immemorial rights, such 
as liberty of speech and press, immunity from arbitrary arrest and 
cruel punishments, freedom of peaceable assembly, and the right to 
be tried by a jury of one's peers after a public hearing of witnesses 
on both sides. Ten amendments, constituting a Bill of Rights, were 
accordingly adopted by Congress and ratified by the states soon after 
the inauguration of the new government (November, 1791). The 
demand for these amendments shows that the states still regarded 
the central government with something of that jealous and cautious 
distrust with which they had viewed the officers of the British crown, 
\ 187. Amendments to the Constitution. Only nine amendments 
have been added to the Constitution since the passage of the Bill 
of Rights. Of these, two were slight revisions of clauses in the origi- 
nal articles, and three were occasioned by slavery and the Civil War. 
The Sixteenth Amendment (1913) gives Congress power to levy an 
income tax without regard to population; the Seventeenth (1913) 
provides for popular election of United States senators ; the 
Eighteenth (19 19) prescribes nation-wide prohibition; the Nineteenth 



THE CONSTITUTION 153 

(1920) confers the suffrage throughout the country on women (who 
had already, in a campaign of seventy years, won the vote in about 
a score of states by state action). If the process of amending the 
Constitution were less complicated (see Art, V) we should probably 
have many more amendments, for proposals are constantly being 
agitated for changes in the Constitution, such as giving Congress 
the right to regulate corporations or to make laws governing mar- 
riage, divorce, and child labor, or providing for the election of the 
president for a single term or by a popular vote, 

188. The "Implied Powers" of the Constitution. In the absence 
of specific amendments Congress is able to extend its authority pretty 
widely by stretching the so-called ^' elastic clause " of the Constitution, 
which, after the enumeration of specific powers of Congress, adds, 
" And to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carry- 
ing into execution the foregoing powers" (Art, I, sect. 8, par, 18). 
From the very earliest days of our government there have been \ 
4iarties_with._QppQ^ite...views on the interpretation of this clause of the , | 
^.Constitution, The " strict constructionists " have held that the letter 
of the Constitution must be observed, and that Congress and the 
president must exercise only the powers explicitly granted to them in 
Articles I and II, On the other hand, the ''loose constructionists," 
professing themselves equally devoted to the Constitution, have con- 
tended that the true interpretation of its spirit involves the assump- 
tion by the president and Congress of powers not explicitly granted, 
but evidently intended and implied. The recent industrial and com- 
jnercial development of our country has made the question of the ex- 
_tent andjppwer of the federal government a very vital one. For 
example, when the Constitution gives Congress the right to " regulate 
commerce among the several states" (Art. I, sect. 8, par. 3), does 
that power necessarily carry with it the regulation of the rates which 
railroads shall charge to carry goods from state to state, the regula- 
tion of the corporations which do a large business in and between 
many states, and even the regulation of the factories whose products 
go into all the states of the Union ? Our rapid economic development 
has carried our great industries beyond the limits and control of the 
states. Can we respect the power of the states and still maintain 
the efficiency of our national government ? That is the great question 
which today divides the advocates of federal extension and the 
critics of '' federal usurpation." 



154 



THE NEW REPUBLIC 



References 



The Critical Period: John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 
chaps, ii-v; Old South Leaflets, Nos. 2 (The Articles of Confederation), 13, 
127 (The Northwest Ordinance) ; A. C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and 
the Constitution (American Nation Series), chaps, iv-xi; J. B. McMaster, 
History of the People of the United States, Vol. I, chaps, i-v; Edward Chan- 
NiNG, History of the United States, Vol. Ill, chaps, xiii-xv; E. M. Avery, 
History of the United States and its People, Vol. VI, chap, xviii; A. B. Hart, 
American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 37-41, 46, 47, 52; 
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. III. 

A More Perfect Union: Fiske, chaps, v-viii; McLaughlin, chaps, xii- 
xviii; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, chap, viii; Max Farrand, The 
Framing of the Constitution, Records of the Federal Convention, and The 
Fathers of the Constitution (Chronicles, Vol. XIII) ; Avery, Vol. VI, chap, xx; 
Channing, Vol. Ill, chap, xvi; C. A. Be.ard, Readings in American Government 
and Politics, Nos. 14-21; Old South Leaflets, Nos. 70, 99, 186, 197; The Feder- 
alist, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, Introduction, pp. vii-xxix, Nos. 2, 10, 15, 27, 
85; H.art, Vol. Ill, Nos. 60-75. 

The Federal Power: B. Moses, The Government of the United States, 
chaps, iv-vii; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (abridged edition), 
chaps, iii-xxvi; R. L. Ashley, The American Government, pp. 204-355; S. E. 
Forman, Advanced Civics, pp. 115-161; The Federalist, Nos. 4i-44> 52-82; 
Beard, Nos. SS-158. 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Northwest Ordinance: William MacDonald, Select Documents 
of American History, 1775-1861, No. 4 (for text) ; Fiske, pp. 187-207; Roose- 
velt, Vol. Ill, pp. 231-276; Old South Leaflets, Nos. 13, 42; Hart, Vol. Ill, 
Nos. 36, 42, 46; McLaughlin, pp. 108-122; B. A. Hinsdale, The Old North- 
west, pp. 255-269; W. F. Poole, in The North American Review, Vol. CXXIL 
pp. 229-265. 

2. The Opposition to the Constitution: [in New York] The Federalist, 
Introduction, pp. xi.x-xxix; [in Massachusetts] S. B. Harding, Contest over 
Ratification in Massachusetts (Harvard Historical Studies, 1896) ; [in general] 
Hart, Vol. Ill, Nos. 70, 7i> 73-75; McLaughlin, pp. 277-317; Fiske, pp. 
306-345. 

3. The Powers of the Speaker of the House: Beard, Nos. 101-105 ; 
Bryce, pp. 104-107; Anna Dawes, How we are Governed, pp. 120-145; M.'Xry 
Follett, The Speaker of the House; Hart, Practical Essays in American 
Government, No. i ; Franklin Pierce, Federal Usurpation, pp. 162-169. 

4. Our Foreign Relations under the Confederation: McLaughlin, pp. 
89-107; also Western Posts and British Debts (American Historical Association 
Report, i8p4), pp. 413-444; McM.aster, Vol. I, chaps, iii-iv; F. A. Ogg, The 
Opening of the Mississippi, pp. 400-460; Fiske, pp. 131-144, 154-162. 



CHAPTER VII 
FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 

Launching the Government 

189. The United States in 1789. The United States which 
Washington was called upon to preside over jnLJ_7.89j by the unani- 
mous vote of the presidential electors, was a far different country 
from the United States of today. A free white population of 
3,200,000, with 700,000 slaves, — considerably less altogether than 
the present population of New York City, — was scattered along the 

__Atlantic seaboard from the rockbound coast of New England to the 
rice lands of Georgia. T*hiladelphia, the gay capital of the Confedera- 
tion, had a population of 42,000. New York had about 32,000 ; 
Boston, Charleston, and Baltimore had passed the 10,000 mark. A 

^small but steady immigration, chiefly of Scotch-Irish stock from.^A 
Virginia and North Carolina, had followed Daniel Boone and John *^ 
Sevier across the Alleghenies to found settlements in Kentucky and 
Tennessee. The census of 1790 estimated that 109,000 of these 
hardy frontiersmen were scattered through the rich valleys of the 
Ohio and Cumberland Rivers. 

190. Industries and Commerce. What is now a land of factories 
and cities was then a land of forests and farms. Over 90 per cent of 
the inhabitants were tillers of the soil. Shipping and fishing were 
the only industries of importance. Manufactures, which, as we have 
seen, were discouraged by the mother country in colonial days, had 
made but little progress since the war. Our first Secretary of the 
Treasury, in a report on manufactures, two years after Washington's 
inauguration, could enumerate but seventeen industries which had 
reached a fair degree of development, chief among them being iron, 
leather, pottery, textiles, tools, and hardware. But money, capital, and 

free labor were scarce, while land was abundant and the foreign de- 
mand for foodstuffs constant. Moreover, England, by those inventions 
and improvements in spinning, weaving, mining, transportation, 

155 



156 



THE NEW REPUBLIC 



and the application of steam power to manufacture, which are 
known as the Industrial Revolution, had gained a prestige in industry 
which made her the workshop of the world. It was profitable for us 
to buy her manufactured goods with our agricultural products, and it 
fitted our habits as a people of farmers and traders. Our ships were 
already engaged in successful voyages to China, India, and the coast 
of Africa. Washington's first Congress passed laws favoring our 
commerce. A rebate of lo per cent on the customs duties was 
allowed on goods imported in American ships, while the tonnage 




EARLY RIVER STEAMBOAT 



dues in our ports on foreign-owned vessels ranged from 30 to 50 
cents a ton as against 6 cents a ton on American-owned vessels. 
191. Travel and Transportation. Travel was infrequent in Wash- 
ington's day. The roads were scarce and poor, and the inns crude 
and comfortless. The lumbering, springless stagecoach, with its 
stifling leathern curtains for protection against wind and rain, was 
the only means of transportation for those whose business prevented 
them from traveling by water^ or whose health or circumstances made 
impossible the journey by horseback. In any case, the means of 
transportation at the end of the eighteenth century showed no essen- 
tial improvement in comfort or speed over those of two thousand 
years earlier, — the horse, the sailboat, and the stage. The journey 
of a Roman official from x\sia Minor to Italy in fourteen days, over 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 157 

the splendid roads of the Roman Empire, could not have been dupli- 
cated anywhere in America, or even in Europe, in the year 1800. 
Men were already experimenting with the propulsion of boats and 
wagons by steam, devising queer craft with paddling oars and vehicles 
with rattling chains, but it was to be some years still before the 
"•teamboat and the locomotive ushered in the age of rapid transit. 

192. The Sale of Public Lands. A few years before Washington's 
inauguration Congress opened to sale the public domain west of the 
Alleghenies. The plan favored at first was the disposal of tracts 
reaching into millions of acres to land companies (the Ohio and 
Scioto) or to private speculators (the Symmes grant) who undertook 
to colonize the land with settlers from the states and from Europe. 
But the more successful method, suggested by Thomas Jefferson, 
was the laying out of townships six miles square, divided like a 
checkerboard into 36 sections of a square mile (or 640 acres) each. 
These sections were sold in Pldladelphia at auction, at not less than 
$1 an acre. Later (1796, 1800) land offices were opened in West- 
ern towns, like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati ; half sections were sold 
at $2 an acre, ^nd purchasers were allowed liberal credit. Later 
still (1820) the price was reduced to $1.25 an acre, and parcels 
as small as 80 acres were sold. The government's encouragement of 
Western settlement was one of the most important facts in our his- 
tory. We shall see in later chapters how the hardy, democratic people 
of the West influenced our political and social development. 

193. Social Conditions. Society in the American cities jealously 
guarded the distinctions of high birth and good breeding. Powdered 
wigs, silver buckles, liveried footmen, stately courtesy of speech and 
manners, were the marks of the social aristocracy. But for all its 
brave show it was a-harmless aristocracy. The wide gulf which today 
separates fabulous wealth from sordid poverty did not exist in the 
United States of 1789. Our visitors from Europe, especially the 
Frenchmen, were impressed with the general diffusion of moderate 
prosperity in America and were filled with prophetic hopes that 
this land would be forever a model of democracy to the "caste- 
ridden" countries of Europe. 

194o The Inauguration of the Government. The first Wednes- 
day in March (March 4), 1789, had been appointed by the old Con- 
gress of the Confederation as the day for the assembling of the new 



158 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

Congress of the United States. On the third of March the guns of 
New York fired a parting salute to the old government, and on 
the next morning a welcoming salute to the new. But both salutes 
stirred only empty echoes ; for the old Congress had ceased to meet 
some months before, and the new Congress was not ready to or- 
ganize for nearly a month to come. Poor roads, uncertain convey- 
ances, and the lateness of the elections had prevented more than half 
of the twenty-two senators^ and three fourths of the fifty-nine con- 
gressmen from reaching New York City, the temporary capital, on 
the appointed day. It took the entire month of April for the Houses 
to organize, to count the electoral vote, notify Washington formally 
of his election, and witness the ceremony of his inauguration as first 
president of the United States (April 30). Washington's journey 
from his fine estate of INIount Vernon, on the Potomac, to the city 
of New York was one long ovation. The streets were strewn with 
flowers. Triumphal arches, dinners, speeches, cheers, and songs gave 
him the grateful assurance that his inestimable services in war and 
peace were appreciated by his countrymen. His characteristic re- 
sponse showed no elation of pride, but only a deepened sense of 
responsibility in his new office. "I walk on untrodden ground," he 
wrote ; '' there is scarcely an\' action the motive of which may not be 
subjected to a double interpretation ; there is scarcely any part of 
my conduct that may not hereafter be drawn into precedent." All 
eyes were upon him. His task was immense. He- had to create the 
democratic dignity of the president's office, to choose wise counselors, 
to appoint upright and able judges, to hold factions in check, to deal 
wisely with the representatives of foreign powers, to set a precedent 
for the relations of the executive to Congress, to preserve the due 
forms of official ceremony without offending republican principles ; 
and it needed every particle of his wisdom, his tact, his patience, 
his zeal, to accomplish the task. 

195. Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State. After some entreaty 
Washington prevailed on Thomas Jefferson to give up his diplomatic 
position as minister to France and become Secretary of State in the 
first cabinet. Jefferson was a great statesman and scholar, with an 
intense faith in the sound common sense of the people, and an equally 

1 North Carolina and Rhode Island did not come into the Union until some months 
after Washington's inauguration. 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 159 

strong distrust of a powerful executive government. Sometimes his 
enthusiasm led him to extreme statements, as, for example, that 
a revolution every twenty years or so was good for a nation ; but 
his practice was more moderate than his theory, and he never actually 
encouraged or supported any revolution except the great one which 
made us an independent nation. 

196. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. For 
Secretary of the Treasury Washington chose Alexander Hamilton, 
a native of the Bjritish island of_Nevis in the West Indies, who had 
come to New York for his education at King's (Columbia) College 
in 1769 and ardently embraced the American cause. He served as 
Washington's aid-de-camp during the P.evolution, sat in the conven- 
tion that framed the Constitution, and, by his brilliant essays in 
"The Federalist" and debates in the New York convention, secured 
almost single-handed the ratification of the Constitution by his state. 
He differed absolutely from Jefferson on every question of the inter- 
pretation of the Constitution and the policy of the government. The 
two men, each convinced of the justice and necessity of his own 
view, glared at each other across the cabinet table and even on oc- 
casions rose trembling with rage, ready to lay violent hands on each 
other. Each begged the President to choose between them and let 
the other resign. But Washington prevailed on them both to remain 
in the cabinet during his first administration. 

197. The Business before Congress. An immense and varied 
mass of business confronted the-first Congress of the United States 

.in. creating the departments of government (State, Treasury, War), 
establishing courts and post offices, subduing hostile Indians, sifting 

Jhe proposed amendments to the Constitution (of which ten were 
adopted), taking the census, fixing salaries, and voting appropria- 
tions. But the most urgent business of all was the adjustment 
of the country's finances. Alexander Hamilton occupies the center 
of the stage in Washington's first administration. The brilliant 
young Secretary of the Treasury had two great problems to handle, 
namely, the establishment of the credit of the United States, and 
the providing of an adequate income to meet the expenses of the 
government. How well he solved these problems we may learn from 
the ornate eulogy bestowed on him forty years later by Daniel Web- 
ster : "He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant 



i6o THE NEW REPUBLIC 

streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of 
Public Credit, and it sprang upon its feet." 

198. The Debt of the United States. The debt of the United 
States in 1789 was $54,000,000. About $12,000,000 of this was 
owed to France and Holland, who had been our allies in the Revo- 
lutionary War ; and the remainder was a domestic debt, mostly in 
the form of certificates of the government promising to pay the 
holder the amount named on the paper. Now everybody agreed that 
the good faith of the United States demanded that every dollar of the 
foreign debt should be paid. But Hamilton's proposal to pay the 
domestic debt as well, at its full face value, was strenuously resisted. 
During the weak administration of the Confederation the certificates, 
or the government's promises to pay, had fallen far below the value 
named on their face. Honest debtors had been forced to part with 
these government certificates at only a fraction of their value, and 
shrewd money changers had bought them up as a speculation. It 
was even hinted by Hamilton's enemies that he had given his friends 
and political supporters advance information that he was going to 
pay the full value of the certificates, and so enabled them to buy 
up the paper and make enormous profits out of the government. In 
spite of the fact that it enriched some rascals at the expense of the 
community at large, Hamilton insisted that the full faith of th(,' 
United States be kept, and that the certificates be redeemed at their 
face value. It would be the only way, he argued, to prevent futun? 
holders from selling at a discount our government's pledges to pay. 
He was right. Since his day the credit of the United States has been 
so sound that its bonds, or promises to pay at a future date, have 
generally been as good as gold. 

199. The "Assumption" of the Debts of the States. Besides 
paying the national debt in full, Hamilton insisted that the govern- 
ment should assume the debts (amounting to about $20,000,000) 
which the various states had incurred in the Revolutionary War. This 
policy of ''assumption" was a very shrewd one, for, by making the 
national government responsible for the country's whole debt, it 
taught creditors both at home and abroad to regard the United 
States as a single political power, greater than the sum of its parts, 
the states. It made possible a uniform rate of interest and standard 
of security for all the public debt ; and, as men are always interested 




ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS i6i 

in the prosperity of those who owe them money, it ralUed the rich 
investing classes to the support of the national government. 

200. A Tariff Levied. To meet the interest on the $75,000,00.0 
made by adding the state debts to the full face value and unpaid 
interest of the old national debt under the Confederation, an annual 
revenue of over $4,500,000 was needed. Hamilton proposed to raise 
this money by an excise tax on distilled liquors and by a tariff, or cus- 
toms duties levied on imported goods. As our foreign trade was 
large, a tariff averaging less than 10 per cent was sufficient to meet 
the demand. Besides providing a revenue for running the govern- 

• ment, the duties levied on imported goods would encourage native 
manufactures by "protecting" them against European competition. 
Our country would thus cease to be an almost purely agricultural 
community, with the limited outlook and interests of a farming 
people ; cities would grow up, and the various fields of enterprise 
opened by manufacture and commerce would give employment to 
people of varied talents, would attract immigrants from foreign coun- 
tries, and would promote inventiveness and alertness in our 
population. 

201. A National Bank Chartered. The crowning feature of 
Hamilton's financial system was the establishment of a National 
Bank, chartered by Congress to act as the government's agent and 
medium in its money transactions. The Bank was to have the 
privilege of holding on deposit all the funds of the United States 
collected from customs duties, the sale of public lands, or other 
sources; $2,000,000 of the $10,000,000 of the Bank's capital was 

I to be subscribed by the United States, and its notes were to be ac- 
^ cepted in payment of all debts owed the United States. In return 
for these favors the Bank was to manage all the government loans,, 
was to be ready in time of financial stress to furnish aid to the 
Treasury of the United States, and was to be subject to the general 
supervision of the national government through reports on its c®n- 
dition submitted not oftener than weekly to the Secretary of the 
Treasury. 

202. Opposition to Hamilton's Policy. The whole financial 
- , program of Hamilton met with bitter antagonism. Assumption was 
r' opposed by states like Virginia and North Carolina, which through 

the sale of their Western lands had nearly paid off their debts. The 



1 62 THE NEW REPUBLIC I 

excise was resented by the farmers, who found the most profitable 
and convenient disposition of their grain in its conversion into 
whisky. The tariff was opposed by the purely agricultural states of 
the South, which contended that the government had no business 
to encourage one form of industry (manufactures) in preference to 
another (farming). The Bank was opposed on the ground that 
Congress was nowhere in the Constitution given the power to create 
a corporation and to favor it with a monopoly of the government's 
financial business. In his famous reports and recommendations to 
Congress in the years 1790 and 1791 Hamilton argued his cause 
with such force and brilliancy that he overcame opposition and put 
his whole program through ; although in some instances, as in the 
case of " assumption," only by the narrowest majorities. 

203. The First Political Parties. The result of Hamilton's 
policy was the division of the cabinet. Congress, and the country 
at large into two well-defined parties, one led by himself (to which 
both Washington and the vice president, John Adams, inclined), 
the other led by Jefferson. Hamilton's followers were called Fed- 
eralists, because they advocated a strong federal (central) govern- 
ment as opposed to ,the state governments. The Jeffersonian party 
took the name Democratic-Republican, from which they very soon 
dropped the "Democratic" part, as the word was brought into dis- 
repute by extreme revolutionists in France. The Republican party 
of Jefferson's day (to be carefully distinguished from the present 
Republican party, which was organized in 1854 in opposition to 
the extension of negro slavery) had its chief following in the Southern 
states. It favored agriculture as against manufacturing industries. 
It advocated the " strict construction " of the Constitution. Finally, 
the Republicans had confidence in the people at large to conduct the 
greater part of the business of government in their local institutions 
of state, county, and town ; whereas the Federalists believed that a 
part of the people, " the rich, the well-born, and the able," as John 
Adams wrote, should govern the rest. Hamilton even went so far, in 
a political argument with Jefferson, as to bring his fist down on the 
table and shout, " Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast ! " 

204. Antagonism between Hamilton and Jefferson. Jefferson's 
ideal, in a word, was a government for the people and by the 
people, while Hamilton's ideal was a government for the people by 



1 64 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

the trained statesmen allied with the great property holders. The 
former is the democratic ideal, the latter the aristocratic or paternal 
ideal. In varying degrees of intensity these two conceptions of 
government have been arrayed against each other through the entire 
history of our country. Party names have changed ; men have called 
themselves Federalists, Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Populists, 
Socialists; parties have emphasized scores of ''paramount issues," 
such as a national bank, the tariff, state rights, the acquisition of 
new territory, curbing the trusts, the free coinage of silver, and the 
government ownership of the railroads. But underneath all these 
party issues lies the fundamental antagonism of the Jeffersonian and 
the Hamiltonian principles, — democracy or paternalism, jealous 
limitation of the powers granted to the national government or 
deliberate extension and confirmation of them. 

The Reign t»F Federalism 

205. The Reelection of Washington. As the election of 1792 
approached, Washington wished to exchange the cares ^of the presi- 
dency for his beloved acres of Mount Vernon, on the banks of the 
Potomac. But he yielded to Hamilton's entreaty and became a 
candidate for a second term. The financial policy of the Secretary 
of the Treasury had aroused bitter antagonism, and was rapidly 
consolidating the opposition party of Republicans, headed by Thomas 
Jefferson. If the strong hand of Washington should be withdrawn 
from the government at this critical moment, the work of three years 
might be ruined by the strife of parties before it had had time to 
prove its worth. Washington was the only man above the party dis- 
cord. His election was again unanimous, but the Republican party 
proved its strength throughout the country by electing a majority 
to the House of Representatives of the third Congress (i 793-1 795). 

206. The French Revolution. Washington had scarcely taken 
the oath of office a second time when news came of events in France 
which were to plunge Europe into twenty years of incessant warfare, 
to color the politics of the United States during the whole period, 
and even to involve us in actual wars with both France and Eng- 
land. The French people accomplished a wonderful revolution in 
the years 1 789-1 791. They reformed State and Church by sweeping 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 165 

away many oppressive privileges and age-long abuses by the nobles 
and the clergy. But the enthusiasm for reform degenerated into a 
passion for destruction. Paris and the French government fell into 
the hands of a small group of ardent radicals, who overthrew the 
ancient monarchy, guillotined their king and queen, and inaugurated 
a ''reign of terror" through the land by the execution of all those 
who were suspected of the slightest leanings toward aristocracy. 
The revolutionary French Republic undertook a defiant crusade 
against all the thrones of Europe, to spread the gospel of ''liberty, 
equality, and fraternity." In the summer of 1793 it was at war 
with Prussia, Austria, England, and several minor kingdoms of 
western Europe. 

207. Washington's Proclamation of Neutrality. Naw France, 
was our ally. Her government had been the first in Europe to recog- 
nize the independence of the United States, by the treaties of com- 
merce and alliance of 1778. Her king had lent us large sums of 
money, and sent us men and ships, in the hope that he was contrib- 
uting to the downfall of the British Empire. The treaty of alliance 
of 1778 pledged us to aid France in the defense of her possessions 
in the West Indies if they were attacked by a foreign foe, and to 
allow her the use of our ports for the ships she captured in war. 
But did the treaty with Louis XVI's government, made for mutual 
defense against England, pledge us, after both parties had made 
peace with England (1783), to support the French faction which 
had overthrown Louis XVI's government ? The President thought 
not. Accordingly, with the unanimous assent of his cabinet, Washing- 
ton issued on April 22, 1793, a proclamation of neutrality, which 
declared that it was the policy of the United States to keep aloof 
from the complicated hostilities of Europe. 

208. Reasons for our Neutrality. The proclamation of neutral- 
ity was prompted by the state of our own country as well as by 
that of Europe. On our northwestern frontier the British were still 
in possession of a line of valuable fur posts extending along our 
side of the Great Lakes from Oswego to Mackinac, and were secretly 
encouraging the Indians to dispute the occupation of the Ohio valley 
with the emigrants from the Atlantic seaboard. To the south and 
southwest the Spaniards were inciting the Creeks and Cherokees of 
Florida against the inhabitants of Georgia and, by closing the mouth 



1 66 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

of the Mississippi to our western shipping, were tempting the pioneers 
of Kentucky and Tennessee from their allegiance to the United 
States. To have joined France in her war against England and 
Spain, therefore, would have been to let loose the horrors of Indian 
massacre on our borders,^ to risk the permanent loss of our trading 
posts on the Great Lakes, and perhaps to throw the pioneer com- . 
munities of the southwest into the arms of Spain, who offered them 
free use of the great river for the transportation of their hogs and 
grain. Neutrality was an absolute necessity for the maintenance of 
our territory and the amicable settlement of disputes then pending 
with our neighbors England and Spain. 

209. " Citizen" Edmond Genet. A few days before the proclama- 
tion of neutrality was issued " Citizen Genet " arrived at Charleston, 
South Carolina, as minister of the French Republic to the United 
States. Genet had no idea that America could remain neutral. He 
was coming quite frankly in order to use our ports as the base of 
naval war against the British West Indies, and to instruct this 
government in its proper conduct as the ally of the " sister republic " 
of France. His journey from Charleston to Philadelphia was a con- 
tinuous ovation of feasting, oratory, and singing of the '^ Marseillaise " 
i)y the Republicans, who hated England as the source of the "aris- 
tocratic" ideas of Hamilton and the other Federalists. Genet was 
vain and rash. His head was turned by Republican adulation. His 
conduct became outrageous for a diplomat. He issued his orders to 
the French consuls in America as if they were his paid agents and 
spies. He used the columns of the Republican press for frenzied 
appeals to faction. He scolded our President and secretaries for not 
learning from him the true meaning of democracy. He defied the 
proclamation of neutrality by openly bringing captured British ships 
into our ports and fitting them out as privateers to prey on English 
commerce in the West Indies. He even addressed his petulant let- 
ters to Washington, and when reminded by the Secretary of State 

1 The Indians south of Lake Erie, already excited over the immigration of the whites 
into Ohio, had ambushed a force of 1400 led by General St. Clair in 1791 and allowed but 50 
to escape from the field uninjured. Lord Dorchester, governor of Canada, openly encour- 
aged the Indian chiefs, telling them that war between England and America was imminent 
and that the Americans would be driven off the Indian lands. In the autumn of 1794 Gen- 
eral Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians severely in the battle of the Fallen Timbers (sixty 
miles south of Detroit) and compelled them by the Treaty of Greenville (1795) to relinquish 
most of Ohio to the whites. 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 167 

that the President did not communicate directly with ministers of 
foreign countries, he threatened to appeal to the people of the United 
States to judge between George Washington and himself. Such 
conduct was too impertinent for even the warmest Republican sym- 
pathizers with France to stand. At the request of the adminis- 
tration Genet was dismissed. His behavior had brought discredit 
on the extreme Republicans and strengthened the hands of the 
Federalists. 

210. Strained Relations with Great Britain. A more serious 
problem for the administration of Washington than the maintenance 
of neutrality was the preservation of peace with England. We have 
alread}'' seen how British garrisons still held fortified posts on our 
shores of the Great Lakes. The value of the fur trade at the posts 
was over $1,000,000 annually, and the excuse Great Britain gave 
for not surrendering them was that American merchants owed large 
debts in England at the time of the treaty of 1783, which our govern- 
ment had not compelled them to pay. We, on our side, complained 
that the British, on the evacuation of our seaports at the close of the 
Revolution, had carried off a number of our slaves in their ships ; 
had closed the West Indian ports to our trade ; had refused to send 
a minister to our country ; and, at fhe outbreak of the war with 
France in 1793, had begun to stop our merchantmen on the high 
seas to search them for deserters from the British navy, and had 
actually "impressed" into British service many genuine American 
citizens. The exasperated merchants of New England joined with 
the Republican friends of France in demanding war with England. 
A bill to stop all trade with Great Britain (a " Nonintercourse Act") 
was defeated in the Senate only by the casting vote of Vice President 
Adams, who wrote that many in the country were " in a panic lest 
peace should continue." At a hint from Washington, Congress would 
have declared war on Great Britain. 

211. The Jay Treaty. But Washington was determined to have 
peace. He nominated John Jay, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 
as special envoy to Great Britain to negotiate a new treaty. Jay 
sailed in May, 1794, and returned about a year later with the best 
terms he could obtain from the British ministry. England agreed to 
evacuate the fur posts by the first of June, 1796, and to submit 
to arbitration the questions of disputed boundaries, damages to 



i68 



THE NEW REPUBLIC 



American shipping, and the debts due British merchants ; but she 
refused to make any compensation for the stolen slaves, and made 
such slight concessions to our trade in the West Indies that the 
Senate threw out that clause of the treaty entirely. On one of the 
most important points, the forcible arrest and search of our vessels 
for the impressment of seamen, the treaty was silent. A storm of 
opposition greeted the treaty in America. Those who wanted Jay 

to fail in order that the war with 
England might be renewed and 
those who wanted him to succeed 
in securing advantageous terms 
from England were both disap- 
pointed. Jay, who was one of the 
purest statesmen in American his- 
tory, was accused of selling his 
country for British gold and was 
burned in effigy from Massachusetts 
to Georgia. Hamilton was stoned 
in the streets of New York for 
speaking in favor of the treaty. 
Even Washington did not escape 
censure, abuse, and vilification. 
However, the President was per- 
suaded that the terms of the treaty 
were the best that could be obtained, and his influence barely 
secured the necessary two-thirds vote of the Senate to ratify it 
(June 24, 1795). 

212. The Pinckney Treaty with Spain. The same year that 
war with England was averted Thomas Pinckney was sent as special 
envoy to the court of Spain, and there negotiated an important treaty 
by which Spain recognized the thirty-first parallel as the boundary 
between Florida and the United States and granted us the free navi- 
gation of the Mississippi together with the '' right of deposit" at New 
Orleans. This last provision meant that we could unload our river 
boats and transfer the cargoes to ocean-going vessels without 
payment of duty. 

213. The End of Washington's Administration. Thus Washing- 
ton closed the critical years of his second administration at peace 




JOHN JAY 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 



169 



with the world. In a Farewell Address to the people of America, 
published six months before his retirement from office, hewarned 
the country against the spirit of faction at home and '' permanent, 
alliances with any part of the foreign world." He had attempted 



V*" '"^ ' V-' -*-**^ 



a-^Py^ i:f' ^<i(!^c<hj c:i:zf£^ci-i:K^ 






<2^(g^ 











By Courtesy of The Burrows Brothers Company, from Avery's "History oi the United Slates" 
FACSIMILE OF THE FAREWELL ADDRESS 

to give the country a nonpartisan administration, but during his 
second term he had indmed.more and more to Federalist principles. 
Jefferson and Randolph, the two Republican members of his cabinet, 
had resigned, and their places had been taken by Federalists. Deter- 
mined that the laws of Congress should be obeyed in every part of 



170 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

every state of the Union, the administration had summoned the 
militia of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland, fif- 
teen thousand strong, to march against certain riotous counties in 
western Pennsylvania, where the taxes on whisky distilleries were 
resisted and the United States excise officers attacked.^ The Repub- 
licans opposed the administration at every step. The press on both 
sides became coarse and abusive. Washington was reviled in language 
fit to characterize a Nero. "Tyrant," ''dictator," and "despot" 
were some of the epithets hurled at him. He was called the "step- 
father of his country," and the day was hailed with joy by the Re- 
publican press when this impostor should be "hurled from his 
throne." The election of 1796 was a bitter party struggle, in which 
the Federalist candidate, John Adams, won over Thomas Jefferson,, 
by only three electoral votes (71 to 68). 

214. The "X Y Z Affair." A bitter quarrel with France filled 
Adams's administration. The Directory, as the government of the 
French Republic during the period 1 795-1 799 was called, resenting 
the refusal of their ally and "sister republic" of America to join in 
the war against aristocratic Britain and incensed by the Jay Treaty, 
declined to receive our minister C. C. Pinckney (December, 1796) 
and even ordered him to leave the soil of France. Adams addressed a 
special session of Congress in a message in which he declared that 
such conduct "ought to be repelled with a decision which should 
convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people^ 
humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear." Still Adams desired 
peace, and, on a hint from Talleyrand, the French Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, that an embassy would be received to discuss the political 
and commercial disputes between the two countries, he appointed 
John Marshall of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts to 
join Pinckney in negotiating a settlement with France. But the 
envoys were treated even worse than the minister had been. Talley- 
rand sent three private citizens to them as agents, demanding that 
before any negotiations were opened Adams should apologize to 
France for the language of his message to Congress, and that a large 

1 The "Whisky Rebellion" (1794) collapsed in the face of this prompt action by the 
government, and Washington, who had marched in person part of the way with the army, 
returned in relief to the capital The Republicans alternately ridiculed the administration 
for its elaborate military preparations against a "few irate farmers," and censured it for 
being willing to shed the blood of American citizens over a few barrels of stolen whisky. 




JOHN ADAMS 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 171 

sum of money should be paid into the private purses of the directors. 
Two of the American commissioners then left Paris in disgust.^ 

215. A State of War with France. Adams sent a strong message 
to Congress, declaring that he had done everything in his power to 
preserve the peace, '^ I will never send another minister to France," 
he said, ''without assurances that he will be received, respected, and 
honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and inde- 
pendent nation." The great majority of Americans heartily applauded 
the language of the President and joined in the new patriotic song 
"Hail, Columbia," with ''huzzas for Adams and Liberty." Prepara- 
tions for war were begun. Eighty thousand militia were held in 
readiness for service and George Washington was called to the chief 
command, with Hamilton and Knox as his major generals. The 
Navy Department was created and ships of war were laid down. 
Congress did not actually declare war on the French Republic, but 
it abrogated the treaties of 1778 and authorized our ships to prey 
upon French commerce. From midsummer of 1798 to the close of 
the following year a state of war with France existed, and several 
battles were fought at sea. Then Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew 
the Directory and made himself master of France. Napoleon desired 
peace with America ; he had enemies enough in Europe. He signi- 
fied his willingness to come to an agreement with the United States, 
and President Adams, to the great disappointment of the Federalists, 
who were bent on war, but to his own lasting honor as a patriot, 
accepted Napoleon's overtures and concluded a fair convention 
(treaty) with France in February, 1801. At the beginning of the 
new century we were again at peace with the world. 

216. The Alien and Sedition Acts. But the government had 
already passed from the Federalists. In the heyday of their power, 
in the exciting summer of 1798, they had carried through Congress 
a set of laws designed to silence opposition to the administration. 
A Naturalization Act increased from five to fourteen years the term 
of residence in the United States necessary to make a foreigner a 
citizen. An Alien Act gave the president power for a term of two 
years " to order all such aliens as he should judge dangerous to the 

1 This insulting attempt to bribe the American commissioners is called the " X Y Z 
Affair," because the three French agents were designated by those letters, instead of by 
name, in the published dispatches of our State Department. 



172 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

peace and safety of the United States ... to depart out of the ter- 
ritory of the United States." A Sedition Act, to be valid till the 
close of x\dams's administration, provided that anyone writing or pub- 
lishing "any false, scandalous, and malicious writings" against the 
government, either House of Congress, or the president, " or exciting 
against them the hatred of the good people of the United States, to 
stir up sedition," should be punished by a fine not exceeding $2000 
and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. These Alien and 
Sedition acts were opposed by John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton^ 
and other clear-sighted Federalists ; but in the hysterical war fever 
of 1798 any legislation directed against French immigrants and the 
unbridled insolence of the Republican press was sure to pass. 

217. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. The Republicans 
immediately took up the challenge of the Alien and Sedition acts. 
The legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia passed resolutions in 
November and December, 1798, prepared by Jefferson and Madison 
respectively. The former declared the Sedition Act '' altogether void 
and of no effect " ; and the latter characterized the acts as " alarming 
infractions of the Constitution," which guarantees freedom of speech 
and of the press (First Amendment). Kentucky and Virginia invited 
the other states to join with them in denouncing the acts and de- 
manding their repeal at the next session of Congress. These resolu- 
tions are of great importance as the first assertion of the power of 
the states, through their legislatures, to judge whether the laws passed 
by Congress are valid (constitutional) or not. 

218. The Downfall of the Federalists. The Alien and Sedition, 
acts furnished fine campaign material for the Republicans, who could 
now change their poor role of champions of France for the popular 
cause of the defense of the Constitution and the dignity of the states. 
Aided by dissensions in the Federalist party between the followers 
of Hamilton and those of Adams, the Republicans carried the presi- 
dential election of 1800 for Jefferson and Burr, and secured a 
majority in the new Congress. The Federalists had bent the bow of 
authority too far, and it snapped. They never regained control of the ' 
government, although they continued to put a presidential candidate 
in the field and to poll a few votes until the election of 181 6. 

219. Attempt to keep Jefferson out of the Presidency. The 
last acts of the Federalists before their retirement on the fourth ot 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 173. 

March, 1801, showed a somewhat petty and tricky party spirit. 
Every Republican elector had written the names of Jefferson and 
Burr on his ballot, meaning, of course, that Jefferson should be presi- 
dent and Burr vice president. But as the Constitution then stood, 
the two men were technically tied for first place (see pages 150- 
151). Burr was an ambitious politician, and, though he knew that 
the electors did not intend to make him president, he would not 
withdraw in favor of Jefferson. The House of Representatives, with 
whom the choice lay (Constitution, Art. II, sect, i, par. 2), was 
the Federalist House elected in the exciting year 1798. Many of the 
members voted for Burr, solely to keep the Republican leader out of 
the presidential chair. But after a long contest Jefferson finally won. 

220. The " Midnight Judges." The Federahsts,. having lost con- 
trol of the executive and legislative branches of the government by 
the elections of 1800, made a desperate attempt to hold the judicial 
branch at least. In its closing days the Federalist Congress created 
several new United States judgeships, many more than the judicial 
business of the country demanded, and the President filled the offices, 
with stanch Federalists. These new officers were nicknamed the 
"midnight judges," because Adams was occupied until far into the 
evening of his last day of office (March 3, 1801) in signing their 
commissions. Early the next morning he left the White House 
without waiting to greet the incoming president. 

221. Services of the Federalist Statesmen. In spite of their 
ungracious acts in the last days of their power, the Federalists had 
governed well. On the day of Jefferson's inauguration the Columbian 
Centinel of Boston, the leading Federalist paper in New England,, 
published a long list of the benefits which that party had bestowed 
on the nation : peace secured with England, France, and Spain ; 
credit restored abroad and the finances set in order at home ; a navy 
created, domestic manufactures encouraged, and foreign trade stimu- 
lated. It pointed with just pride to the honest, able, courageous 
administrations of Washington and Adams ; the constructive states- 
manship of Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris ; the diplomatic skill 
of Jay, Marshall, and the Pinckneys. The services of these men to 
the country were great and lasting. 



174 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

The Jeffersonian Policies 

222. The New Capital, Washington. The White House, which 
John Adams left so unceremdniously on the morning of the day 
Thomas Jefferson entered it, was a big, square, unfinished building, 
more like the quarters of a cavalry regiment than the residence of 
the chief executive of a nation. Thrifty Abigail Adams wrote to 
a friend that a retinue of thirty servants would be needed to run 
the house when it was finished ; and meanwhile she dried the presi- 
dential washing in the unplastered East Room during stormy weather. 
The city of Washington, to which the seat of government had been 
moved from Philadelphia in the summer of 1800,^ was itself as 
crude and unfinished as the president's mansion. A couple of execu- 
tive buildings stood near the White House, and more than a mile 
to the eastward the masons were at work on the wings of the Capitol. 
Instead of the stately Pennsylvania Avenue which now connects the 
Capitol and the White House, there was a miry road running across 
a sluggish creek. The residential part of the city consisted of a few 
cheerless boarding houses for the accommodation of the members of 
Congress, exiled to these wastes from the gay city of Philadelphia. 
"We need nothing here," wrote Gouverneur Morris, ''but houses, 
men, women, and other little trifles of the kind to make our city 
perfect." 

223. Jefferson's Political Views. The new President, with his 
large, loose figure, his careless carriage, his ill-fitting and snuff-stained 
apparel, his profuse and informal hospitality, presented as great 
a contrast to the stately poise and ceremony of Washington and 
Adams as the crude city on the Potomac did to the settled colonial 
dignity of Philadelphia. Jefferson hated every appearance of 
"aristocracy." His confidence was in the plain people of America. 
He wanted to see them continue a plain agricultural people, govern- 
ing themselves in their local assemblies. The national government 

lat Washington should confine itself, he thought, to mianaging our 
Idealings with foreign nations, a comparatively small task which 

1 The states of Maryland and Virginia presented the government a tract of land ten miles 
square on the Potomac. Congress named the tract the District of Columbia. The city of 
Washington was built on the northern side of the river on the Maryland cession, and the 
land to the south of the Potomac was retroceded to Virginia in xSii6 




THOMAS JEFFERSON 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 175 

could be performed by a few public servants. Army and navy were 
to be reduced, the public revenue was to be applied to paying the 
debt which the wicked war scares of the Federalists had rolled up, 
and the government was no longer, as Jefferson phrased it, to " waste 
the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." 
Still Jefferson showed no desire to revolutionize the government, as 
some of the New England Federalists thought he would. In his 
inaugural address, which was couched in a dignified and conciliatory 
tone, he declared that Federalists and Republicans were one in com- 
mon devotion to their country. He praised our government as a 
''successful experiment," and himself built on the foundations which 
the Federalists had laid. The Alien and Sedition laws expired with 
Adams's administration, and when the new Republican Congress had 
turned out the '" midnight judges " by the repeal of the Judiciary Act, 
restored the five-year period for naturalization, and repealed the 
excise taxes, there was little to distinguish it from the Congresses 
of Washington's administration. The tariff was retained, and the 
Bank was not disturbed. But strict economy was introduced 
in the expenditures of the government by the new Secretary of 
the Treasury, Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, a naturalized Swiss, 
who is rated second only to Alexander Hamilton in the adminis- 
tration of the finances of our country. Gallatin introduced the 
modern form of budget with its specific appropriations for each 
item of national expense. Army and navy appropriations were 
more than cut in two, and about 70 per cent of the revenue, or over 
$7,000,000 a year, was devoted to paying off the national debt. 

224. Napoleon Bonaparte acquires Louisiana. However, a 
piece of European diplomacy led President Jefferson, whose twin 
political doctrines were strict adherence to the letter of the Consti- 
tution and severe economy in the expenditures of the public moneys, 
himself to stretch the Constitution further than any Federalist had 
ever done, and to expend at a stroke $15,000,000 of the national 
revenue. In the year 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte, the new master of 
France, conceived the idea of establishing a colonial empire in the 
New World, in the valley of the great river which had been opened 
over a century before by the heroic labors of the French explorers 
Marquette, Hennepin, and La Salle. He induced Spain, by the 
secret treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), to cede to him the entire 



176 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

western basin of the Mississippi, called Louisiana.^ When in the 
spring of the year 1802 Jefferson finally heard of this treaty of San 
Ildefonso, he was much disturbed by the prospect of having the 
control of the west bank and the mouth of the Mississippi pass from 
the feeble administration of Spain to the powerful and aggressive 
government of Napoleon. The settlers in the Northwest Territory, 
in Kentucky, and in Tennessee were completely isolated from the 
seaports of the East by the mountains. Their lumber, wheat, hogs, 
and tobacco had to seek a market by way of the Mississippi, 
with its tributaries, the Ohio, Cumberland, and the Tennessee Rivers. 
Three eighths of the commerce of the United States in 1800 passed 
through the mouth of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. It was 
therefore absolutely necessary to the life of our nation that the im- 
portant city of New Orleans, which controlled the mouth of the river, 
should not be converted from a port of deposit for the commerce 
of the western states and territories into an armed base of war in 
the great duel between France and England. Much as he disliked 
England, Jefferson wrote to Robert R. Livingston, our minister in 
Paris, that ''every eye in the United States was now turned to the 
affair of Louisiana," and that the moment Napoleon took possession 
of New Orleans we "must marry ourselves to the British fleet and 
nation." 

225. Jefferson purchases Louisiana. The President's worst fears 
were realized when, in October, 1802, the Spanish government, prob- 
ably at the bidding of Napoleon, to whom Louisiana was just about 
to be handed over, closed the mouth of the Mississippi by with- 
drawing the right of unloading and reshipping secured by Pinckney's 
treaty of 1795 (see page 168). Jefferson, knowing that it would be 
impossible to force Napoleon to open the river to our trade, secured 
an appropriation of $2,000,000 from Congress for the purpose of 
buying New Orleans and West Florida outright, and sent James 
Monroe to Paris to aid Livingston in the negotiation. At first Napo- 
leon rejected any offer for New Orleans, but suddenly changed his 
mind and ordered his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to dispose of the 
whole province of Louisiana to the Americans. After the loss of 

1 The name " Louisiana," in honor of Louis' XIV. was given to the whole Mississippi 
Valley by La Salle when he planted the cross at the mouth of the great river in 16S2. In 1763 
France had ceded the eastern basin to England and the western to Spain (p. 88). 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 177 

an army under his brother-in-law Leclerc in the West Indies, Napo- 
leon, with his characteristic caprice in shifting plans, had decided 
to abandon his colonial enterprise in the New World and confine 
his struggle with Great Britain in the Eastern Hemisphere. After 
much bargaining he accepted Livingston's offer of $15,000,000 for 
Louisiana, over $3,500,000 of which was to be paid back to our own 
citizens in the West for damage to their trade. The terms were agreed 
to April 30, 1803. 

226. The Great Significance of the Louisiana Purchase. The 
purchase of Louisiana was the most important event of American 
history in the first half of the nineteenth century. It doubled the 
area of the United States and brought under our rule one of the 
most valuable tracts of land in the world. Fourteen states have been 
created wholly or in part out of the Louisiana territory. The popu- 
lation has grown from 50,000 in 1804, of whom half were slaves, to 
over 20,000,000. The cattle and timber of Montana, the wheat of 
Minnesota and the Dakotas, the corn of Kansas, and the sugar and 
cotton of Louisiana have been the source of rapidly increasing wealth 
to our country. By the census of 19 10 the value of the farm prop- 
erty alone in these fourteen states was $16,472,155,529, or over a 
thousand times what we paid for the whole territory. 

227. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Furthermore, the ac- 
quisition of Louisiana stimulated the interest of the government in 
the vast territory to the west of the Mississippi River. Less than two 
months after the cession of Louisiana to the United States, Jefferson 
commissioned Captain Meriwether Lewis, his private secretary, to 
head a scientific exploring party to the Far Northwest. It seems not 
to have troubled Jefferson that he was trespassing on Spanish ter- 
ritory. Lewis associated with him William Clark, younger brother of 
George Rogers Clark of Revolutionary fame. After wintering at the 
mouth of the Missouri River, the Lewis and Clark expedition started 
westward in the spring of 1804 with a company of thirty-five men. 
They ascended the Missouri to its source, crossed the Rockies, and de- 
scended the Columbia River to the sea, making important studies 
in their two and a half years' journey, of the natural features of the 
country and the habits of the Indian tribes. Their remarkable expe- 
dition was an important factor in our claim to the Oregon country 
in our dispute with England forty years later. 



178 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

228. The Political Aspects of the Louisiana Purchase. The 
political consequences of the Louisiana Purchase were not less im- 
portant than its geographical consequences. No clause of the Con- 
stitution of the United States could be found giving the president 
the right to purchase foreign territory by a treaty which promised 
(as the third article of the Louisiana treaty promised) that " the 
inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union 
of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible ... to the en- 
joyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the 
United States." Jefferson, somewhat disturbed by his departure from 
his own doctrine of the "strict construction" of the Constitution, 
contemplated at first having an amendment passed, giving the people's 
sanction to the purchase. But his friends in Congress persuaded him 
that it was both unnecessary and unwise, — unnecessary because the 
Constitution gives the president and Senate the right to conclude 
treaties, and unwise because during the long delay necessary to 
secure such an amendment Napoleon might again change his mind 
and deprive us of our fine bargain ; or because ^pain, hearing that 
Napoleon had broken the Treaty of San Ildefonso by the sale of 
the province to another power, might enter her protest at Washing- 
ton. Jefferson acquiesced in the judgment of his friends and said 
nothing about the necessity for an amendment in his message to the 
new Congress which assembled in December, 1803.^ That the vast 
province of Louisiana would ever be incorporated into the United 
States seemed questionable to Jefferson. He wrote in 1804, "Whether 
we remain one confederacy or fall into Atlantic and Mississippi con- 
federacies I believe not very important to the happiness of either 
part." Meanwhile, however, by bringing within the jurisdiction of 
Congress a new territory which doubled the size of the United States, 
Jefferson enormously increased the authority of the central govern- 
ment, — an authority which in theory he combated. 

229. Jefferson's Popularity. The country enthusiastically in- 
dorsed the purchase of Louisiana. President Jefferson was at the 

1 Congress established the extreme southern part of the Louisiana province as the terri- 
tory of Orleans and provided for its administration by a governor, a secretary, and judges 
appointed by the president of the United States. For over a year there was no elected 
assemblv in Orleans ; there was not even the ancient civil right of trial by jury. The inhab- 
itants of the territory were made subjects, not citizens, of the United States, and it was not 
until eight years later that they were admitted (as the state of Louisiana, 1S12) to the 
" rights, advantages, and immunities " promised them in the treaty of 1803- 



-36 




^ 



120 L.L.POATEg ENS. CO., N.Y. 



/?. 



,1 




GULF 

The Louisiana Purchase Territory with States 
subsequently made from it 



Route of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 
+++-f + Western Boundary agrreed on by Treaty with Spain, 1819 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 179 

height of his popularity. In 1804 he was reelected by 162 electoral 
votes to 14 for his Federalist opponent, C. C. Pinckney. At the same 
time with the election returns came the news of the success of the 
small American fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, under the brave com- 
manders Preble, Bainbridge, and Decatur, in the war against the 
insolent pasha of Tripoli, who was attacking our commerce and levy- 
ing blackmail on our government. Our diplomacy and arms success- 
ful abroad ; our territory doubled at home ; our debt reduced, in 
spite of the purchase of Louisiana ; our people united, save for a 
few malcontents in New England and Delaware, — such was the 
record of the years 1801-1805. 

230. The Conspiracy of Aaron Burr. But Jefferson's second 
term was filled with disappointment and chagrin. The country was 
distressed by the conspiracy of Aaron Burr. That brilliant but un- 
principled politician, while still vice president, had offered himself 
as a candidate for governor of New York, and being defeated through 
the efforts of Alexander Hamilton, had challenged Hamilton to a duel 
and mortally wounded him at the first shot (July 11, 1804). After 
this dastardly act Burr conceived g^desperate plan for retrieving his 
fortunes and reputation. Just what he intended to do is uncertain, — 
whether to establish an independent state in the Mississippi Valley, 
or to seize the city of New Orleans and carve an '' empire for the 
Burr dynasty" out of Spanish territory to the southwest of the 
United States. At any rate, he threw the whole Western country 
into commotion for two years, until he was abandoned and betrayed 
by his treacherous accomplice. General James Wilkinson. In 1807 
Burr was seized while trying to escape into Spanish Florida and 
brought to Richmond for trial. John Marshall, the Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court, a Federalist appointed by President Adams, pre- 
sided over the trial. Jefferson was extremely anxious to have Burr 
convicted; but the jury, under Marshall's charge, found no "overt 
act of treason" to justify a verdict of "guilty," and Burr was dis- 
charged, to spend the rest of his long life in obscurity and misery. 
|But the Burr trial was of small account among Jefferson's troubles, 
when compared with the failure of his "peace policy," in the face 
of the devastating wars which raged in Europe, 



i8o THE NEW REPUBLIC 

The War of 1812 

231. Napoleon Bonaparte the Tyrant of Europe. The unholy 
ambition of one man kept the civilized world in a turmoil during 
the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century and stirred war from 
the shores of Lake Erie to the steppes of Russia. Napo'eon Bona- 
parte, made master of France by his sword at the age of thirty 
(1799), found France too small a theater for his genius and aimed 
at nothing less than the domination of the continent of Europe 
and the destruction of the British colonial empire. The latter object 
was frustrated when Admiral Nelson shattered the combined fleets 
of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar, October 21, 1805. But a 
few weeks later, by his victory over the armies of Russia and Austria 
in the tremendous battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon began to realize his 
ambition of dominating the continent. Henceforth Britain was 
mistress of the ocean, but for ten years Napoleon was master of the 
land. Having failed to destroy Great Britain's fleet. Napoleon sought 
to kill her commerce. By decrees issued from Berlin and Milan in 
1806 and 1807 he declared the continent closed to British goods and, 
ordered the seizure of any vessel that had touched at a British port. 
Great Britain replied by Orders in Council, forbidding neutral vessels 
to trade with any countries under Napoleon's control (which meant 
all of Europe but Scandinavia, Russia, and Turkey), unless such 
vessels had touched at a British port. These decrees and orders, 
if strictly enforced, meant the utter ruin of neutral trade ; for the 
English seized the merchant vessels that had not touched at British 
ports, and the French seized those that had, 

232. The American Ocean Trade. It was the American trade 
that suffered especially. During the nine years' war between France 
and England (i 793-1802) the United States had built up an immense 
volume of shipping. Her stanch, swift vessels, manned by alert tars, 
were the favorite carriers of the merchandise of South America, the 
West Indies, and the Far East to all the ports of Europe. Our own ex- 
ports too — the fish and lumber of New England, the cotton and rice 
of the South, the wheat and live stock of the trans-Allegheny country 
— had increased threefold (from $20,000,000 to $60,000,000) since 
the inauguration of Washington. Our shipments of cotton alone, 
thanks to the invention in 1793 of the cotton "gin" (engine) for 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 



i8i 







separating the seed from the fiber, grew from 200,000 pounds in 1791 
to over 50,000,000 pounds in 1805. In the latter year some 70,000 
tons were added to our merchant marine, requiring the addition of 
4200 seamen. Sailors' wages rose from $8 to $24 a month. Hundreds 
of foreigners became naturalized in order to enjoy the huge profits of 
American shipowners. Some idea of the volume of our foreign trade 
in proportion to the size and wealth of our country at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century, as compared with that at the close of 
the century, can be realized from the following figures: in 1900, 
when our population was al- 
most 80,000,000 and our 
wealth $100,000,000,000, less 
than 10 per cent of our foreign 
trade (only 816,000 tons) was 
carried in American ships ; in 
1 8 10 our population was less 
than 8,000,000 and our esti- 
mated wealth $2,000,000,000, 
but 91 per cent of our foreign 
trade (980,000 tons) was car- 
ried in our own vessels. 

233. The Impressment of 
American Seamen. It was 
this immense foreign trade, 
the chief source of our coun- 
try's wealth, that was threatened with ruin by Napoleon's decrees 
and the British Orders in Council. British frigates cruised along our 
shores from New England to Georgia, stopping our ships at will, 
boarding them, and taking off scores of sailors on the ground that 
they were British deserters. In her desperate struggle with Napoleon, 
Great Britain could not afford to have her seamen leave her ships by 
hundreds to take advantage of the high wages, good food, and 
humane treatment which they found aboard the American vessels. 
If the British lieutenant conducted his examination of an American 
crew in a summary fashion, and '^ impressed" a good many real 
Americans among the suspected deserters to serve the guns of the 
British frigates, he thought he was only erring on the right side. 
After all, Englishmen and Americans were not so easy to tell apart. 




IMPRESSING AMERICAN SEAMEN 



1 82 ■ THE NEW REPUBLIC 

234. The Chesapeake Affair. The dimax was reached when the 
British ship Leopard opened fire on the American frigate Chesapeake 
off the Virginia coast, June 22, 1807, because the American refused 
to stop to be searched for deserters. Three of the Chesapeake's men 
were killed and eighteen wounded before she surrendered. It was an 
act of war. The country was stirred as it had not been since the 
news of the battle of Lexington. Resolutions poured in upon the 
President pledging the signers to support the most rigorous measures 
of resistance. 

235. The Embargo Act. But Jefferson had reduced our navy far 
below the point necessary to protect American commerce, and his 
only remedy was "peaceful coercion." By an Embargo Act of 
December 22, 1807, Congress forbade all ships to leave our harbors 
for foreign ports. The double purpose of the embargo was to starve 
Europe into showing a proper respect for our commerce and to 
prevent our ships from capture. The latter object the embargo cer- 
tainly accomplished, for if the ships did not sail, they could hardly 
be taken. But the remedy was worse than the disease. The mer- 
chants of New England preferred risking the loss of a few men and 
vessels to seeing their ships tied idly to the wharves and their mer- 
chandise spoiling in warehouses. They even accused Jefferson of being 
willing to ruin their shipping in order to be avenged on the Fed- 
eralists and to further his pet industry of agriculture. A storm of pro- 
test arose from the commercial classes of the country. It was evident 
that the continuance of the embargo would mean the overthrow of 
the Republican party, if not civil war ; and the hated act, which cost 
New England merchants alone a loss of $8,000,000 in fifteen months,, 
was repealed March i, 1809, and a Nonintercourse Act with Great 
Britain and France passed in its stead. Three days later Jefferson 
turned over the government to his successor, James Madison. 

236. President Madison's Diplomacy. Madison had rendered 
the country magnificent services a quarter of a century earlier in the 
convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, but 
he seemed to have lost all power of initiative. He neither prepared 
for war nor developed any effective policy of peace. He was singu- 
larly lacking in diplomatic judgment, allowing himself, in his anxiety 
for peace, to believe too readily the word of anyone who brought a 
welcome report. When the new British minister, Erskine, announced 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 183 

in 1809 that his country would withdraw the Orders in Council, 
Madison hastily reopened commerce with England, without waiting 
to see whether the British ministry would sanction Erskine's promise 
or not. To Madison's chagrin the promise was disavowed and the 
minister recalled. The next move of the administration was an at- 
tempt to bribe England and France to bid against each other for our 
trade. Congress repealed the Nonintercourse Act in 18 10 and sub- 
stituted for it Macon's bill, which provided that as soon as either 
France or England withdrew its decrees against our shipping the 
Nonintercourse Act should be revived against the other country. 
This was too good a chance for the wily Napoleon to let slip. He 
announced (August 5, 1810) that the Berlin and Milan Decrees 
were repealed, and called upon the American President to redeem 
his promise by prohibiting intercourse with Great Britain. Again 
Madison jumped at the chance of bringing Great Britain to terms by 
diplomacy. In spite of the British ministry's warning that Napoleon 
would not keep his word (a judgment amply proved by the facts), 
Madison issued a proclamation reviving the Nonintercourse Act 
against Great Britain if she should not have repealed her Orders in 
Council before February 2, 181 1. The day passed without any word 
from the British ministry, and again Congress forbade all trade with 
Great Britain and her colonies. 

237. New British Provocation. The year 181 1 brought other 
fuel to feed the fires of anti-British sentiment. In May our frigate 
President, chasing a British cruiser which had impressed a citizen 
of Massachusetts, was fired upon by the British sloop of war Little 
Belt, which was forced by the American ship to strike her colors. In 
November, William Henry Harrison, governor of the Northwest, de- 
feated the Indians at Tippecanoe Creek in the Indiana territory, and 
wrote home, " The Indians had an ample supply of the. best British 
glazed powder, and some of their guns had been sent them so short 
a time before the action that they were not yet divested of the list 
coverings in which they are imported." The suspicions of our govern- 
ment, therefore, that the British had been inciting the Indians on our 
northwestern frontier since St. Clair's disastrous defeat twenty years 
before seemed to be confirmed. 

238. Henry Clay and the "War Hawks." The new Congress 
which met in the early winter of 181 1 contained a group of energetic 



1 84 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

men, the "war hawks," as John Randolph called them, who were de- 
termined that the independence and dignity of the United States 
should be respected. They were of the new generation that had 
grown up since the Revolutionary War, and their confidence in the 
greatness and future promise of the United States was unbounded. 
They demanded that the impotent diplomacy which had humiliated 
our government since the end of the first administration of Jefferson — 
the so-called ''peaceful war" of embargo and nonintercourse — 
should be abandoned. The leader of the "war hawks" was Henry 
Clay, a Virginian born, who had moved out to the new state of 
Kentucky as a young law student and had rapidly raised himself, 
by his great gifts of intellect and oratory, to be the first citizen of 
the state. Clay was elected Speaker of the House in the new Con- 
gress, and as he made up his committees it became evident that the 
war party was to direct the policy of the government. " The period 
has arrived," reported the Committee on Foreign Affairs, "when it 
is the sacred duty of Congress to call upon the patriotism and re- 
sources of the country." Clay descended from the chair and urged 
the war in such strains of oratory as had not been heard in Congress 
for twenty years. He held before the West the vision of the easy 
conquest of Canada, and defeated the proposal of the moderate mem- 
bers of the House to make one more effort for peace by sending a 
special envoy to England. President Madison was carried along by 
the war current. 

239. Congress declares War on Great Britain. Madison sent a 
strong message to Congress, June i, 1812, reviewing the hostile acts of 
Great Britain, and Congress responded on the i8th with a declara- 
tion of war. Had the special envoy been sent to England the war 
would have been averted ; for, two days before Madison signed the 
declaration of war, the British ministry, sincerely anxious to preserve 
peace with the United States, decided to repeal the offensive Orders in 
Council. But there was no cable to bring the news at once, so the 
unfortunate war between the sister nations of the English tongue 
began just when Napoleon Bonaparte led his army of half a million 
men across the Russian frontier, hoping to crush the last great power 
of the European continent that dared to resist his despotic will. 

240. Our Failures on the Canadian Frontier. The United States 
was woefully unprepared for war. Our regular army numbered less 




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1 86 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

than 7000 soldiers, many of them raw recruits under untrained com- 
manders. Our navy consisted of 15 ships to England's 1000. The 
New England States protested against " Mr. Madison's war " (which 
they would better have called ''Mr. Clay's war"), and Vermont and 
Connecticut refused point-blank to furnish a man of their militia to 
invade Canada. The year 181 2 saw our commander at Detroit, Wil- 
liam Hull, court-martialed and sentenced to death for the cowardly 
abandonment of his post, and our generals at the other end of Lake 
Erie fighting duels with each other instead of advancing together 
against the enemy. The conquest of Canada, which Clay had boasted 
could be accomplished by the militia of Kentucky alone, showed 
little prospect of fulfillment in the campaign of 1812-1813. But for 
the victory of Oliver H. Perry's little fleet on Lake Erie (September 
ID, 18 13) and Thomas MacDonough's deliverance of Lake Cham- 
plain (September 11, 18 14), we could hardly have been saved from 
a British invasion from Canada, which would have cost us the 
Northwest Territory and the valley of the Hudson. 

241. The Recapture of Detroit. Cheered by Perry's famous dis- | 
patch from Lake Erie, " We'have met the enemy and they are ours," 
William Henry Harrison, who had succeeded Hull, was able to re- 
capture Detroit and drive the British across the river, inflicting a 
severe defeat on them in the battle of the Thames (October 5, 18 13). 
This was the nearest we came to a " conquest of Canada " ; for at 
the eastern end of Lake Erie our last attempt at invasion, under 
General Jacob Brown, resulted only in the drawn battle of Lundy's. 
Lane (July 25, 1814). 

242. The British raid Washington. In August, 18 14, a British 
force of less than 5000 men sailed up the Patuxent and raided the 
city of Washington, after putting to disgraceful flight the 7500 raw 
militia troops hastily gathered at Bladensburg to defend the national 
capital. The British burned the White House, the Capitol, and 
some department buildings, and inflicted about $1,500,000 worth of 
wanton damage on the property of the city. They then departed 
for Baltimore, where a similar raid was frustrated by the alertness 
of the Maryland militia and the spirited defense of Fort McHenry 
(September 12, 18 14). It was the sight of our flag still waving on 
the ramparts of Fort McHenry, after a night's bombardment, that 
inspired Francis Key's song, "The Star-Spangled Bannero" 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 187 

243. The War on the Sea. In sharp contrast with our disasters 
on land, the war on the ocean, despite the great inferiority of our 
navy in point of numbers, brought a number of surprising triumphs 
for the American ships. The exploits of our frigates President, 
United States, and Constitution ("Old Ironsides") kept the country 
in a fever of rejoicing. On all the lines of world commerce — in the 
Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans, off the coast of New 
England, among the Indies, in the English waters, and beyond the 
Cape of Good Hope — the privateers and merchantmen of both coun- 
tries played the game of hide and seek. In the first seven months 
of the war over 500 British merchantmen were taken by the swift 
Yankee privateers, and before the war was over some 2000 prizes were 
captured, many of which were, however, retaken. The British had 
boasted at the beginning of the war that they would not let an 
American craft cross from New York to Staten Island, but before 
the war was over they were themselves paying 1 5 per cent insurance 
on vessels crossing the English Channel. However, in the end, the 
Americans were the worse sufferers by the war, their exports falling 
from $110,000,000 in 1807 to $7,000,000 in 1814. Eventually, too, 
our little navy, in spite of its exploits, had to yield to Great Britain's 
superiority in numbers. At the close of the war all our frigates were 
either captured, sunk, or interned in home ports. 

244. The Treaty of Ghent. With the cessation of the long and 
severe commercial struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain, 
the causes of the war between Great Britain and the United States — 
impressments, right of search, blockades, embargoes, nonintercourse 
acts — were all removed. Peace was signed by the American and 
British commissioners, at the city of Ghent in the Netherlands, on 
Christmas Eve, 18 14. The peace restored the conditions before the 
war, and referred to commissioners the settlement of boundary dis- 
putes between the United States and Canada. 

245. Andrew Jackson's Victory at New Orleans. Before the 
news of the Treaty of Ghent reached New York, however ( February 
II, 181 5), two events of importance took place in America. The 
British, failing in their attack on Baltimore, had sailed for the West 
Indies and there joined several thousand veteran troops under General 
Pakenham, just freed from service against Napoleon's armies in the 
Spanish peninsula. Their purpose was to seize New Orleans, paralyze 



1 88 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

the trade of the Mississippi Valley, and perhaps hold Louisiana for 
exchange at the close of the war for territory in the Northwest. But 
Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee frontiersman and Indian fighter of 
Scotch-Irish stock, who was in command of our small army in the 
Mississippi territory, was a man of different caliber from the generals 
on the northern frontier. Pressing every man and mule in the city 
of New Orleans into service, he constructed a hasty but effective 
line of fortifications below the city, and when the British veterans 
attacked with confidence, he drove them back with terrible slaughter, 
laying 2000 of their number on the field in a battle of twenty minutes' 1 1 
duration (January 8, 181 5). Jackson, henceforth the "hero of New 
Orleans," was rewarded in the following years by the command il 
against the Indians of Florida (181 7), the governorship of the Florida 
territory (1*821), a seat in the United States Senate (1823), and 
the presidency of the United States (1828). If the Atlantic cable 
or the swift modern steamship had existed in 1814, it would have 
brought the news of the treaty of peace in time to turn Pakenham's 
expedition back from the Mississippi, to prevent one of the bloodiest 
battles ever fought on American soil, and perhaps to keep from the 
pages of American history the record of the administration of the 
most masterful of our presidents between Washington and Lincoln. 
246. Opposition of New England to the War. While Jackson 
was bringing the war to a victorious close for the American side in 
the far South, the discontent of the New England States with " Mr. 
Madison's war" was ripening into serious opposition to the adminis- 
tration. Every state north of Maryland with a seacoast had voted 
against Madison (that is, against the war) in the election of 1812. 
The sectional character of the war is strikingly shown by the fact that 
of the $11,000,000 loan authorized by Congress in 181 2 New Eng- 
land, which was the richest section of the country, subscribed for 
less than $1,000,000. There were even those in New England who 
let their disgust with the policy of the administration carry them 
into treason and recouped the losses that Madison and Clay brought 
to their commerce by selling beef to the British army in Canada. By 
the end of 181 3 about 250 vessels were lying idle at the docks of 
Boston alone. Petitions began to come in to the Massachusetts legis- 
lature from many towns, praying the state to take steps toward get- 
ting the Constitution of the United States amended in such a way 
as to "secure them from further evils." 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 189 

247. The Hartford Convention. At the suggestion of Massa- 
chusetts delegates from the five New England States met in a 
convention at Hartford, Connecticut, December 15, 18 14. These 
' delegates, twenty-six in number, represented the remnant of the 
Federalist party. They denounced the "ruinous war" and proposed' 
a number of amendments to the Constitution, designed to lessen 
the power of the slaveholding agricultural South, to secure the in- 
terests of commerce, to prevent the hasty admission of new Western 
states, and to check the succession of Virginia presidents. After a 
month's session they adjourned to the following June, and their 
messengers carried their demands to Washington. The messengers 
arrived only to find themselves in the midst of general rejoicing over 
the news of Jackson's victory at New Orleans and the tidings of the 
peace from Ghent, which reached Washington on the same day. The 
triumph of the Republicans was complete, and the crestfallen Hart- 
ford envoys returned to New England bearing the doom of the 
Federalist party. In the presidential election of the following year 
(181 6) the Federalists for the last time put a candidate into the 
field, Rufus King of New York, But King got only 34 electoral 
votes to 183 for his Republican rival, James Monroe, Madison's 
Secretary of State, who continued for another eight years the 
"dynasty" of Virginia Republicans inaugurated by Thomas Jefferson 
in 1801. 

References 

Launching the Government: J. B. McMaster, History of the People of 
the United States, Vol. I, chap, vi; Henry Adams, History of the United 
States of America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, Vol. I, 
chaps, i-vi; Edward Channing, History of the United States, Vol. IV, chaps, 
i-v; J. S. Bassett, The Federalist System (.\merican Nation Series), chaps, 
i-xiii; E. M. Avery, History of the United States, Vol. VII, chaps, i-iv; D. 
R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States, chaps, iii, iv; H. J. Ford, 
Washington and his Colleagues (Chronicles, Vol. XIV) ; biographies of George 
Washington by Paul Leicester Ford, Woodrow Wilson, and Henry Cabot 
Lodge;' biographies of Alexander Hamilton by William G. Sumner, Henry 
Cabot Lodge, and J. T. Morse, Jr. 

The Reign of Federalism: Bassett, chaps, xiv-xix; McMaster, Vol. II, 
chaps. X, xi; Channing, Vol. IV, chaps, v-viii; Avery, Vol. VII, cliaps. v-xiv; 
J. W. Foster, A Century of Diplomacy, chap, v; J. B. Moore, American 
Diplomacy, chaps, ii, iii ; Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency , chaps, 
iv, v; G. W. Allen, The Barbary Wars; A. B. Hart, American History told 
by Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 83-105; H. von Holst, Constitutional His- 
tory of the United States, Vol. I, chaps, iii, iv. 



1 90 THE NEW REPUBLIC 

The Jeffersonian Policies: Edward Channing, The Jeffersonian Systemi 
(Am. Nation), chaps, i-xvii; History of the United States, Vol. IV, chaps. Lx-- 
xiii; R. G. Thwaites (ed.). Original Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedi- 
tion; McMaster, Vols. II, III; Adams, Vols. I-IV; Hart, Vol. Ill, Nos. io6, 
109, 115; Avery, Vol. VII, chaps, xv-xx; F. A. Ogg, The Opening of the Mis- 
sissippi, chaps, x-xiv; W. F. McCaieb, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy; biog- 
raphies of Jefferson by Paul Leicester Ford, J. T. Morse, Jr., H. C. Mer- 
wiN, and D. S. Muzzey. 

The War of 1812: Channing, The Jeffersonian System, chaps, xviii-xx; 
History of the United States, Vol. IV, chaps, xiii-xx; K. C. Babcock, The 
Rise of American Nationality (Am. Nation), chaps, i-xi; Hart, Vol. HI, Nos. 
116-129; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, chap, x; A. T. Mahan, The 
War of 1812; Ralph D. Paine, The Old Merchant Marine (Chronicles, Vol. 
XXXVI), chaps, vi, vii; The Fight for a Free Sea (Chronicles, Vol. XVII); 
Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812 ; Carl Schurz, Henry Clay 
(American Statesmen Series). 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Condition of the Country at the Inauguration of Washington: 
Hart, Vol. Ill, Nos. 10-36; McMaster, Vol. I, pp. i-ioi ; Vol. II, pp. 1-24; 
Bassett, pp. 163-177; Channing, History of the United States, Vol. IV, pp. 
1-27; Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, pp. 398-414. 

2. The Jay Treaty: Winsor, The Westward Movement, pp. 462-484; Nar- 
rative a7id Critical History of America, Vol. VII, pp. 463-471 ; George Pellew, 
John Jay (Am. Statesmen), chaps, x, xi; Hart, Vol. Ill, No. 97; Bassett, pp. 
125-135; Moore, pp. 201-208; William MacDonald, Select Documents, No. 
14 (for text of treaty). 

3. The French War of 1798-1799: McMaster, Vol. II, pp. 370-388, 428- 
434; F. a. Walker, The Making of the Nation, pp. 137-143; Winsor, Nar- 
rative and Critical History of America, Vol. VII, pp. 361-368; A. J. Woodburn, 
American Political History, Vol. I, pp. 162-179. 

4. The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Roosevelt, The Winning of the 
West, Vol. IV, pp. 308-328; Hart, Vol. Ill, No. 1x5; Channing, The Jeffer- 
sonian System, pp. 86-99; Thwaites, Rocky Mountain Exploration, pp. 92-187. 

5. The War Hawks in the Twelfth Congress: McMaster, Vol. Ill, pp. 
426-458; Walker, pp. 220-227; Babcock, pp. 50-63; Adams, Vol. VII, pp. 
1 13-175; Schurz, Vol. I, chap, v; James Schouler, History of the United 
States, Vol. II, pp. 334-356. 

6. The Louisiana Purchase: McMaster, Vol. II, pp. 620-635; Channin-g, 
The Jeffersonian System, pp. 47-72 ; History of the United States, Vol. V, 
pp. 298-335; Adams, Vol. II, pp. 116-134; William M. Sloane, in the Amer- 
ican Historical Review, Vol. IV, pp. 439 ff.; Roosevelt, Vol. IV, pp. 258-282; 
Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 185-209; MacDonald, 
No. 24 (for text of treaty). 



PART IV. NATIONAL VERSUS 
SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 

A New American Spirit 

248. The Completion of our Independence, The close of the 
second war with England ( 1815) marks an epoch in American history. 
During the quarter of a century which elapsed between the inaugura- 
tion of George Washington and the conclusion of the treaty at Ghent, 
the United States was very largely influenced by European politics. 
Our independence was acknowledged but not respected. Neither the 
French republic nor the English monarchy accorded us the courtesies 
due to a sister power ; neither Napoleon nor the ministers of 
George III heeded our protests against the violation of a neutral 
nation's rights. Foreign wars and rumors of war, treaties, protests, 
embassies, absorbed the energies of the administration at Washing- 
ton. Many of our greatest statesmen were serving their country in 
foreign capitals. The eyes of our people were turned toward the 
Atlantic to welcome our swift packets bringing news from Paris, 
London, and Madrid. But with the "universal peace" of 181 5 all 
this was changed. We turned our back on Europe and faced the 
problems of our own growing land. The development of the bound- 
less resources of the United States invited the common effort of all 
sections of our country. 

249. Hindrances to Western Development Removed. Many 
thousand pioneers had crossed the Alleghenies to the rich valleys of 
the Ohio and the Tennessee before the War of 181 2, but the supply 
of both men and capital was too meager to develop the resources of 
the whole eastern basin of the Mississippi. The Indians, encouraged 
by England on the north and by Spain on the south, were a constant 

191 



192 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

source of danger. Lack of roads was so serious a handicap that 
it was not profitable to raise wheat far from the banks of navigable 
rivers. The barrier of the Alleghenies made transportation between 
the Ohio valley and the seaboard so expensive that the wagon driver 
got the lion's share both of the money for which the Western farmer 
sold his wheat in Virginia and of the money which he paid for his 
plow in Ohio. If the pioneer floated his cargo of wheat, pork, or 
tobacco down the Mississippi to New Orleans in a flatboat, it was 




CANAL BOATS CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS 



more profitable to sell boat and all there and return home on horse- 
back than to spend three months battling his way up against the 
current. But during the decade 1810-1820 these difficulties in the 
way of the development of the West were rapidly removed. William 
Henry Harrison by his victories over Tecumseh's braves at Tippe- 
canoe Creek in Indiana territory (1811), and Andrew Jackson by 
his pacification of the Creeks and Seminoles in Florida (1813-1818), 
put an end to the danger from the Indians on our frontiers, in 181 1 
the steamboat (which many years of experiment by Fitch and Fulton, 
on the Delaware, the Seine, and the Hudson, had brought to ef- 
ficiency) made its first appearance on the Ohio River. Henceforth 
the journey from Louisville to New Orleans and back could be made 
inside of a month, and the products of the Gulf region could be 
brought to the Northwest by the return voyage. 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 193 

250. Renewed Westward Emigration. The interruption of our 
foreign commerce by embargo, nonintercourse, and war had sent 
thousands of families westward across the mountains, where better 
farm land could be bought from the government at two dollars an 
acre, with liberal credit, than could be had for ten times that price 
in cash on the seaboard. Moreover, a stream of immigrants of 
the hardy northern stocks of Europe began to pour into our country 
after the War of 1812, to swell the westward march to the farm 







PICKING AND LOADING COTTON 



lands of the Ohio valley. In the single year 181 7, 22,000 Irish and 
Germans came over. A ceaseless procession passed along the Mo- 
hawk valley and over the mountain roads of Pennsylvania and 
Virginia. " The old America seems to be breaking up and moving west- 
ward," wrote an Englishman who migrated to Illinois in 181 7. A 
gatekeeper on a Pennsylvania turnpike counted over 500 wagons 
with 3000 emigrants passing in a single month. 

251. Extension of the Cotton Fields to the Mississippi. At 
the same time the cotton planters of the South were moving from the 
Carolinas and Georgia into the fertile Mississippi territory which the 
campaigns of Andrew Jackson had freed from the terror of the savage. 
The invention of machinery in England for the spinning and weav- 
ing of cotton had increased the demand for that article beyond the 
power of the planters to satisfy, even with the enormous increase 
of production effected by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton 



194 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

gin^ in 1793. How eagerly the planters turned to the virgin soil along 
the Gulf of Mexico may be seen from the following figures. In 1 810 I | 
less than 5,000,000 pounds of cotton were grown west of the Al- 
leghenies, out of a total crop of 80,000,000 pounds ; ten years later 
the new Western states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama) produced 
60,000,000 pounds out of a total crop of 177,000,000 pounds; and 
five years later still, these same states raised over 150,000,000 pounds, 
or about one half the entire crop of the country. 

252. Growth of the New West. With the attractions of cheap 
and fertile farm lands in the Northwest and virgin cotton soil in 
the Southwest, the trans-Allegheny country far outstripped the sea- 
board states in growth of population. While the census of 1820 
showed an increase of only 35 per cent in the New England States, 
and 92 per cent in the Middle Atlantic States, over the population 
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the western common- 
wealths of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee increased 320 per cent 
in the same period. Six new Western states were added to the Union' 
in the decade following the outbreak of the second war with Eng- 
land : Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), Mississippi (181 7), Illinois 
(1818), Alabama (1819), Missouri (1821), — more than had been 
admitted since the formation of our government, and more than 
were to be admitted until the eve of the Civil War. The new West 
was rapidly coming to be a power to be reckoned with in national 
politics. By the apportionment of 1820, 47 of the 213 congressmen 
and 18 of the 48 senators came from beyond the Alleghenies, — 
the land which a generation before was, in the language of Daniel 
Webster, " a fresh, untouched, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." 

253. The West calls for National Aid. The settlers of the new 
West had abundant courage but little capital. In order to connect 
their rapidly developing region with the Atlantic coast, that they 
might exchange their farm products for the manufactures of the 
eastern factories and the imports from the Old World, great outlays of 
money for roads and canals were needed. The national government 

1 The cotton gin (engine) was a machine for separating the cotton seed from the fiber. 
A man could clean about 300 pounds of cotton a day with the gin as against a single pound by 
hand. Whitney's invention was one of the most fateful in history, for it made the production 
of cotton so profitable that the slave system was fixed on the South. Less than 200,000 pounds 
of cotton were exported in 1791, but in 1S07, on the eve of the embargo, the exports reached 
63,000,000 pounds. 



I 




196 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

was asked to contribute to these improvements, which meant not the 
building up of one section of the country only, but the general dif- 
fusion of prosperity, the strengthening of a national sentiment, and 
the promise of a united people to resist foreign attack or domestic 
treachery. President Madison in his last annual message to Congress 
(December, 1816) urged that body to turn its particular attention 
to " effectuating a system of roads and canals such as would have 
the effect of drawing more closely together every part of our country." 




VIEW OF CINCINNATI IN 1825 



254. Calhoun's Bonus Bill. A few days later John C. Calhoun, 
an enthusiastic " expansionist " member from South Carolina, pushed 
a bill through Congress devoting to internal improvements the 
$1,500,000 which the government was to receive as a bonus for the 
establishment of a second National Bank, as well as all the dividend;; 
accruing to the government on its stock in the bank. Calhoun urged 
the need of good roads for transportation of our army and the move- 
ment of our commerce. ''We are great, and rapidly (I was about 
to say, fearfully) growing," he cried; "the extent of our country 
exposes us to the greatest of all calamities next to the loss of liberty, 
\ disunion. . . . Let us bind the republic together with a perfect sy§- 
' tem of roads and canals. . . . Let us conquer space." But Calhoun's 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 197 

Bonus Bill was vetoed by President Madison on his last day of office 
(March 3, 181 7). Not that Madison was opposed to spending the 
nation's money for improving the means of communication with the 
West (as his message of the previous December shows), but because 
he thought that the Constitution needed amending in order to give 
Congress this power. 

255. National Enthusiasm following the War. When Madison's 
successor, James Monroe, was inaugurated on the fourth of March, 
181 7, the country was already at the full tide of the enthusiasm for 
expansion which followed the conclusion of peace at Ghent. Our 
regular army had been thoroughly reorganized and raised to a peace 
footing of 10,000 men. The immense sum of $8,000,000 had been 
appropriated for a new navy. The tariff rates, which had been 
doubled in 181 2 to provide a revenue for carrying on the war, were 
still kept up, and even slightly increased, by the tariff bill of 181 6, 
whose object was to encourage and protect the rising manufactures 
which both North and South hoped would in a few years make us 
independent of Europe industrially, as the War of 181 2 had made us 
independent of Europe politically. Every manifestation of a narrow 
sectional spirit, like that of the Hartford Convention (see page 189), 
was rebuked in Congress and the press as unpatriotic. 

356. The "Era of Good Feeling." A few weeks after his in- 
auguration Monroe made an extended tour through the New England 
States, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, for the ostensible 
purpose of inspecting the national defenses. The real object of the 
journey was quite as much to strengthen the growing Republicanism 
of New England. In Boston, that same Columbian Centinel which 
on the day of the inauguration of the first Republican president, 
Thomas Jefferson, had published a bitter lament over the defeat of 
the glorious Federalist administration, now hailed the inauguration 
of Jefferson's bosom friend and political follower, James Monroe, 
as the promise of "an era of good feeling." The phrase took the 
popular fancy and pleased President Monroe, who spread it during 
his journey, and repeated it on the tour of the Southern states which 
he made in the autumn of the same year (1817). 

257. The Second National Bank. Perhaps no act of Congress 
during the decade following the war shows more clearly how 
thoroughly the war had nationalized the Republican party than 



198 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

the establishment of a second National Bank in 1816. The Repub- 
lican party had maintained a steady opposition to the Bank during 
the twenty years of its existence, and had refused to recharter it 
when its term expired in 181 1. "The state banks," they said, "are 
the pillars of the nation." But during the War of 1812 the state 
banks had failed. There was no confidence in financial circles be- 
cause there was no standard of currency. Notes of New York banks 
were at a discount in Boston, and notes of Baltimore banks at 
a discount in New York ; while the paper of the "wildcat" banks of 
the West, unsupported by gold or silver, was practically worthless 
in the commercial centers of the Atlantic seaboard. The state banks, 
which had been "the pillars of the nation," had now become, said 
one senator, "the caterpillars of the nation." The same men who 
had denounced the National Bank in 181 1 and refused to renew its 
charter now pleaded in favor of it. The same Republican press 
which had assailed Hamilton in 1791 now reprinted his arguments in 
favor of the Bank. And the same party which had feared the sinister 
influence on politics of a bank with $10,000,000 capital in 181 1 now 
chartered a new National Bank with a capital stock of $35,000,000, 
of which the government was to hold $7,000,000. The effect of this 
was the return of confidence to the merchants and bankers of the 
country. The state banks were forced to keep their paper up to 
the standard set by the National Bank or retire from business. 
Secretary of the Treasury Dallas, who found the United States 
Treasury empty in the autumn of 18 14, left a surplus of $20,000,000 
to his successor, Crawford, three years later, 

258. The Supreme Court under John Marshall. Another im- 
portant sign of the growing national consciousness was the strength- 
ening of the national government by several important decisions of 
the Supreme Court. John Marshall of Virginia, a moderate Federal- 
ist, who had served with distinction as an officer in the Revolution, 
and had later been special envoy to France, member of Congress, 
and for a brief period Secretary of State, was appointed Chief Justice 
of the Supreme Court by John Adams in January of 1801. Marshall 
held this highest judicial office in the country for thirty-four years, 
and, by his famous decisions interpreting the Constitution, made for 
himself the' greatest name in the history of the American bench. 
When the peace of 181 5 turned the attention of the country from 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 199 



foreign negotiations to the development of the national domain, 
many questions arose as to the exact limits of the powers of the 
national government and of the various states. The people of the 
United States had given the national Congress certain powers enumer- 
ated in the Constitution, such as the power to lay taxes, to declare 
war, to raise and support armies, to regulate commerce, to coin 
money, and to make all laws which were '' necessary and proper for_ 
carrying into execution" the powers 
granted. Marshall and his asso- 
ciates on the Supreme bench, in a 
number of important cases which 
came before them to test these 
powers, rendered decisions in sup;^ 
port of the national authority 
against that of the states. 

259. McCuUoch vs, Maryland. 
For example, in 18 19 the state of 
Maryland laid a tax on the business 
of the branch of the National Bank 
established in that state, claiming 
that the Constitution did not give 
Congress any right to establish a 
bank. Marshall wrote the decision 
of the Supreme Court in this case, 
justifying the right of Congress to 
establish a bank as a measure neces- 
sary and proper for carrying into 
execution the laws for raising a 
revenue and regulating the currency, 
the bank except for the ground and building it occupied. 

260. The Dartmouth College Case. In the same year, in the 
famous Dartmouth College case, the Supreme Court annulled a law 
of the legislature of New Hampshire, which altered the charter of 
the college against the will of the trustees. The charter, the court 
held, was a contract between the legislature and the trustees ; and 
since the Constitution of the United States forbids any state to pass 
a law impairing the obligation of contracts (Art. I, sect. 10, par. i), 
the law of the New Hampshire legislature was null and void. These 




CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL 

The original is in the possession 
of the Law Association of Phila- 
delphia. From a carbon by 
A. W. Elson & Co. 



The state was forbidden to tax 



2 00 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

decisions, with several others of like character, show how the judicial 
branch of our government contributed to the national feeling which 
we have already seen dominating the legislative branch (Congress) 
in the passage of the army and navy bills, the Bank bill, and the 
tariff bill (1816). 

261. Changes in Social and Economic Conditions. Still further 
indications of a new national consciousness may be seen in our social 
and economic life. The movement and mingling of population in 
immigration from Europe and emigration to the West was rapidly 
breaking down the social privileges and prejudices of sections of our 
country. In New England, for example, the old Puritan dominion 
was yielding to democratic tendencies in politics and religion. Con- 
necticut in her constitution of 1818 (the first new one since her 
colonial charter of 1662) did away with religious qualifications for 
office. New Hampshire passed a Toleration Act in 18 19, and the next 
year the Massachusetts convention for framing a constitution was torn 
with dissensions between the new Unitarians and the old Orthodox 
believers. The Episcopal church in the Southern states also lost its 
predominance with the increase of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immi- 
grants and the growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the frontier 
communities. Distinctly popular movements looking toward the im- 
provement of labor conditions, the establishment of public schools, 
the health and cleanliness of cities, began to be agitated in these 
years. Further westward emigration was encouraged by the reduc- 
tion in 1820 of the price of public lands from $2 to $1.25 an acre, 
and the sale of 80-acre lots instead of the customary sections of 
160 acres. In spite of the caution of Madison and Monroe, Congress 
passed ten acts before 1820, appropriating in all over $1,500,000 for 
roads and canals. 

262. The Beginnings of an American Literature. Finally, the 
beginnings of a truly national literature fell within these years. The 
North American Review, our first creditable magazine, appeared in 
181 5. Two years later William Cullen Bryant published his " Thana- 
topsis." In 1819 appeared Washington Irving's ^'Sketch Book." 
James Fenimore Cooper began shortly afterward his famous series 
of novels dealing with Indian life. Hitherto the work of Ameri- 
can writers, in all but political and religious subjects, had been but 
a feeble copy of the contemporary English models. In Bryant, Irving, 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 201 

and Cooper, America produced her first distinctively native talent, 
which drew its inspiration from the natural beauties, the historical 
traditions, and the novel life of the western world. 

263. The Reelection of Monroe. When the election of 1820 
approached there was no rival candidate to Monroe in the field. The 
Federalist party, with the exception of a few irreconcilables and 
immovables, who, in the witty language of one of their number, re- 
minded themselves of the "melancholy state of a man who has re- 
mained sober when all his companions have become intoxicated," 
had been entirely merged with the nationalized Republicans in the 
" era of good feeling." Monroe received the vote of every elector but 
one, who cast his ballot for John Quincy Adams for the purely senti- 
mental reason that he did not wish to see any president after George 
Washington elected by the unanimous voice of the American people. 

The Monroe Doctrine 

264. Our Neighbors in 1815. It was not alone in the develop- 
ment of our Western domain and the reenforcement of the federal 
power by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court that 
the spirit of the new Americanism manifested itself in the decade, 
following the Treaty of Ghent. That generous glow of national en- 
thusiasm cast its reflection over the whole Western Hemisphere. It 
must be borne in mind that the United States in 181 5 occupied much 
less of the North American continent than it does today. Alaska, 
with its valuable furs and fisheries, belonged to the Russian Empire. 
Besides her present Dominion of Canada, Great Britain claimed the 
Oregon country, a huge region lying between the Rocky Mountains 
and the Pacific Ocean, extending from the northern boundary of the 
present state of California indefinitely toward the Alaskan shore. 
The possessions of Spain reached in an unbroken line from Cape 
Horn to a point three hundred miles north of San Francisco. They 
comprised not only all of South America (except Brazil and Guiana), 
Central America, Mexico, and the choicest islands of the West Indies, 
but also the immense region west of the INIississippi Valley, which now 
includes California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, 
with parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Spain 
also owned what is now the state of Florida (then called East 




^■•'^x^^ Spanish 
English 
Russian 



i^^ Claimed by England and U.S 






NORTH AMERICA IN 1815 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 203 

Florida), and claimed a strip of land (called West Florida) extend- 
ing along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to the mouth 
of the Mississippi. This gave her practical control of the whole 
shore of the Gulf. 

265. Our "Occupation" of West Florida. We disputed the 
claim of Spain to West Florida, however. According to the inter- 
pretation of our State Department at Washington, this territory 
formed part of the original French tract of Louisiana (i 682-1 763), 
and hence was included in the transfer from Spain to Napoleon in 
1800, and in Napoleon's sale of Louisiana to the United States three 
years later. Spain, with better reason, maintained that the bound- 
aries of the old French Louisiana had nothing to do with the trans- 
actions between Napoleon and the United States at the opening of 
the nineteenth century ; that she had received West Florida by the 
treaty of 1783, and that she had not parted with it since. We wanted 
the Florida strip along the Gulf of Mexico for many reasons. It was 
the refuge of Indians, runaway slaves, fugitives from justice, pirates, 
and robbers, who terrorized the South and prevented the development 
of Georgia and the Mississippi territory. It offered in the fine har- 
bors of Mobile and Pensacola an outlet for the commerce of the new 
cotton region. Besides, the Gulf of Mexico was the "natural 
boundary" of the United States on the south. President Madison, 
therefore, in October, 18 10, ordered Governor Claiborne of the Or- 
leans territory to take possession of West Florida as far as the 
Perdido River. Early the next year Congress by a secret act au- 
thorized the President to occupy East Florida also. If the occupation 
of West Florida by the United States was of very doubtful legality, 
the attempted seizure of East Florida was downright robbery. Great 
Britain protested so strongly that Madison prudently disavowed the 
acts of his agents in the latter province and withdrew the American 
troops in 1813. 

266. Jackson's Conquest of East Florida. But the Floridas 
continued to be a source of annoyance to the United States. They 
even furnished a base for England in the War of 181 2. Spain was 
too weak to maintain her authority there and miserably failed to re- 
deem her pledge in the treaty of 1795, to prevent the Indians of 
Florida from attacking citizens of the United States. Finally, the 
Seminole Indians grew so dangerous that President Monroe ordered 



204 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

General Andrew Jackson, the "hero of New Orleans," to pursue 
them even into Spanish territory (December, 1817). Jackson was 
a man who needed no second invitation for an Indian hunt. ''Let it 
be signified to me through any channel," he wrote Monroe, '' that the 
possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, 
and in sixty days it will be accomplished." Jackson did not even wait 
for a reply to his letter. He swept across East Florida, reducing the 
Spanish strongholds of Gadsden, St. Marks, and Pensacola, executed 
by court-martial two British subjects who were inciting the negroes 




JACKSON IN FLORIDA 



and Indians to murder and pillage, and by the end of May, 1818, was 
on his way back to Tennessee, leaving Florida a conquered province. 
267. Our Ultimatum to Spain. Jackson's campaign brought the 
Florida question to a crisis. The administration at Washington was 
in a dilemma. If it indorsed his course, it would have to go further 
and put the responsibility for war in Florida on the shoulders of 
Sp^in. On the other hand, if it should repudiate Jackson's course, 
it would strengthen the position of Spain in Florida and make it 
more difficult to acquire that desirable province. John C. Calhoun, 
the Secretary of War, was for censuring Jackson for exceeding his 
instructions ; but John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, persuaded 
the President to uphold Jackson and put on a bold front. ''We 
shall hear no more apologies from Spanish governors and com- 
mandants of their inability to perform the solemn contracts of their 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 205 

country," he wrote to Minister Erving at Madrid. "... The duty 
of this government to protect the persons and property of our fellow 
citizens on the borders of the United States is imperative — it must 
be discharged." 

268. Spain surrenders Florida to the United States. But Spain 
was in no condition in 1818 to perform her "solemn contracts." Her 
colonies in South and Central America, taking advantage of the over- 
throw of her dynasty by Napoleon (1808), had revolted and estab- 
lished themselves as independent republics. Embarrassed by these 
difficulties, the Spanish court decided to abandon Florida to the 
United States. The treaty was signed at Washington, February 22, 
1819. The United States assumed about $5,000,000 of claims of 
its citizens against Spain, for damages to our commerce in the Napo- 
leonic wars, and in return received the whole of Florida. At the 
same time the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase territory 
was fixed by a line running from the Sabine River in a stairlike 
formation north and west to the forty-second parallel of latitude, and 
thence west to the Pacific Ocean .'^ 

269. Our Interest in Spanish America. Meanwhile we were 
watching with great interest the progress of the revolution in the 
Spanish colonies of South America. As early as 181 1 President Madi- 
son had called the attention of Congress to "the scenes developing 
among the great communities which occupy the southern portion of 
our hemisphere." During the years 1811-1817 the United States 
maintained " consuls," who were really government spies, at Buenos 
Aires, Caracas, and other centers of the revolt. Henry Clay tried to 
force President IMonroe into a hasty recognition of the South Ameri- 
can republics. But the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, 
was more cautious. He had little confidence that the new republics 
would be able to maintain their independence, and he furthermore 
feared that interference by the United States in the affairs of the 
"rebellious colonies" of South America would offend the Spanish 
court and so endanger the success of the negotiations for the acquisi- 
tion of Florida. 

1 The line ran up the Sabine River to 32°, thence due north to the Red River ; thence 
west along the Red River to the one-hundredth meridian of west longitude ; thence 
north to the Arkansas River ; thence west along the Arkansas to its source ; thence north 
to the forty-second parallel of latitude ; thence due west to the Pacific Ocean (see map, 
opposite page 178). 



206 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

270. Our Recognition of the Spanish American Republics. 
However, in the year 182 1 there occurred four events which deter- 
mined the administration to change its policy in regard to the recog- 
nition of the South American republics. First, the final ratifications 
of the treaty of 18 19 were signed, and Florida was ours ; secondly, the 
House, by a vote of 86 to 68, resolved to support the President 
as soon as he saw fit to recognize the independence of the South 
American states ; thirdly, the Czar of Russia issued a ukase (decree) 
forbidding the vessels of any other nation to approach within one 
hundred miles of the western coast of North America, above the fifty- 
first parallel of latitude, claimed by Russia as the southern boundary 
of her colony of Alaska ; and fourthly, the allied powers of Russia, 
Prussia, Austria, and France, having pledged themselves by the " Holy 
Alliance" to the restoration of the power and the possessions of all 
the "legitimate thrones" which the Napoleonic wars had overthrown, 
began to listen to Spain's request to subdue revolts in Madrid and 
restore the rebellious colonies in South America. On May 4, 1822, 
President Monroe took the first step in the protection of the South 
American republics, by recognizing their independence ; and Congress 
immediately made provision for the dispatch of ministers to their 
capitals. 

27L The Monroe Doctrine. Neither Great Britain nor the 
United States could view with indifference the intervention of the 
allied powers of Europe to reduce the South American republics 
to submission to Spain. These republics had naturally thrown off 
the commercial restrictions of Spain with her political authority. 
They had already, by 1822, built up a trade of ^3, 000,000 a year 
with Great Britain, and their market was too valuable a one to lose. 
Our own government was distressed by the rumors that France Would 
take Mexico, and Russia would seize California, with perhaps Chile 
and Peru to boot, as a reward for their part in crushing the rebel- 
lious governments. Accordingly the English premier, George Can- 
ning, suggested to Richard Rush, our minister in London, that the 
United States join Great Britain in making a declaration to the allied 
powers to keep their hands off the new South American states. Mon- 
roe was anxious to act on Canning's suggestion, and the two ex- 
presidents, Madison and the aged Jefferson, replied to his request 
for advice by letters of hearty approval. Secretary Adams declared 
we ought not to follow England's lead, trailing ''like a cockboat to 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 207 

a British man-of-war," but rather assume full and sole responsibility 
ourselves for the protection of the republics on the American con- 
tinent. He therefore advised President Monroe to incorporate in 
his annual message to Congress of December 2, 1823, the famous 
statement of the policy of the United States toward the territory and 
government of the rest of the American continent, which has ever 
since been celebrated as the Monroe Doctrine. 

872. Analysis of the Doctrine. The message declared that the 
continents of the Western Hemisphere were "henceforth not to be 
considered as subjects for future colonization by any European 
powers," — this to prevent the encroachments of Russia on the 
Pacific coast, and the designs of France on Mexico. Further, it 
announced the determination of the United States neither to meddle 
with the European systems of government nor to disturb the existing 
possessions of European powers in the New World. " But," it con- 
tinued, "we owe it to candor and to the amicable relations existing 
between the United States and those powers to declare that we 
should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system 
[of the Holy Alliance] to any portion of this hemisphere as dan- 
gerous to our peace and safety." In other words, the South Amer- 
ican republics, whose independence we had, "on great consideration 
and on just principles, acknowledged," were no longer existing pos- 
sessions of Spain ; and any attempt to impose upon them the abso- 
lutism of the Spanish court by the powers of continental Europe 
would be "viewed as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition 
toward the United States." From the acknowledgment of the South 
American republics, then, in 1822, the United States advanced in 
1823 to the defense of their territory and of their republican form 
of government against European interference. 

273. Interpretations of the Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine has 
been called "the cornerstone of American foreign policy." It goes 
back for its basal idea to George Washington's warning against " en- 
tangling our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambi- 
tions and rivalries," in his Farewell Address of 1796 ; and it has been 
ardently defended whenever there is a question of settling a boundary 
or collecting a debt in the Spanish-American states. Our statesmen 
have gradually stretched the doctrine far beyond its original declara- 
tion of the protection of the territory and the governrrient of the 
republics of Central and South America. It has even been invoked as 



2o8 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

a reason for annexing territory to the United States in order to 
prevent the seizure of the same territory by some European power. 
With the entrance of the United States into the great World War, 
in April, 191 7, and the conspicuous participation of our President in 
the adjustment of complicated world problems at the Peace Confer- 
ence at Paris (19 18-19 19), that part of the Monroe Doctrine which 
regards the world as divided into two separate and remote halves has 
been rendered obsolete. If we still maintain that our interests are 
"paramount" in the Western Hemisphere, we no longer refrain from 
interfering in the political and territorial questions of the Eastern 
Hemisphere. 

References 

A New American Spirit: E. E. Sparks, The Expansion of the American 
People, chaps, xii, xiii, xx, xxii, xxiii; Ellen Semple, American History and its 
Geographical Conditions, chaps, ix, xiii; E. L. Bogart, Economic History of the 
United States, chaps, xiii, xiv; K. C. Babcock, The Rise of American Natio7ial- 
ity (American Nation), chaps, xii-xv; Henry Adams, History of the United 
States of America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, Vol. 
IX; J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. IV, 
chaps, xxxiii, xxxvi; J. W. Burgess, The Middle Period, chap, i; D. C. Gllman, 
James Monroe (American Statesmen) ; E. S. Corwin, John Marshall and the 
Constitution (Chronicles, Vol. XVI), chaps, v-viii. 

The Monroe Doctrine: McMaster, Vol. V, chap, xli; Burgess, chaps. ii,v; 
Babcock, chap, xvii; F. J. Turner, The Rise of the Neiv West (American 
Nation), chap, xii; F. L. Paxson, The Independence of the South American 
Republics; C. R. Fish, The Path of Empire (Chronicles, Vol. XLVI), chap, i; 
J. H. Latane, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish 
America; W. C. Ford, John Quincy Adams; his Connection with the Monroe 
Doctrine {American Historical Review, Vol. VII, pp. 676-696; Vol. VIII, 
pp. 28-52) ; W. F. Reddaway, The Monroe Doctrine. 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Development of Canals and Roads: Katherine Coman, Industrial 
History of the United States, pp. 202-211; Babcock, pp. 243-258; McMaster, 
Vol. IV, pp. 3S1-429; Sparks, pp. 264-269; R. T. Stevens, The Growth of 
the Natiofi, 180Q-183J, pp. 145-174. 

2. John Marshall and the Supreme Court: A. B. Hart, The Formation 
of the Union, pp. 234-236; H. C. Lodge, Daniel Webster (American Statesmen), 
chap, iii; A. B. Magruder, John Marshall (American Statesmen), chap, x; 
Babcock, pp. 290-308; C. A. Beard, Readings in American Government and 
Politics, Nos. 27, 112-114, 118. 

3. The Holy Alliance: Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, 
Vol. Ill, No. 142; Burgess, pp. 123-126; McMaster, Vol. V, pp. 30-41; 



THE GROWTH OF A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 209 

C. A. Fyffe, History of Modern Europe, Vol. II, chap, i; M. E. G. Dupf, Studies 
in European Politics, chap. ii. 

4. Modern Interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine: J. B. Moore, Ameri- 
can Diplomacy, pp. 152-167; also in Harper's Magazine, Vol. CIX, pp. 857 £f.; 
Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 211-240; A. C. Coolidge, 
The United States as a World Power, pp. 95-110; Latane, America as a World 
Power (American Nation), pp. 255-268. 

5. American Literature a Century Ago: McMaster, Vol. V, pp. 268- 
306; Adams, Vol. IX, pp. 198-214; W. E. Simonds, Student History oj 
American Literature, pp. 94-146, 



CHAPTER IX 
SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

The Favorite Sons 

274. The Development of Sectional Rivalry. If we contrast 
the decade which preceded the announcement of the Monroe Doc- 
trine with the decade which followed it, this remarkable fact stands 
out, that every single act and policy of the earlier period in support 
of nationalism — the increase of the army and navy, the recharter 
of the Bank, the sale of public lands on liberal terms, the expendi- 
ture of money from the public treasury for internal improvements, 
the increased authority of the Supreme Court, the high tariff, and 
even the Monroe Doctrine itself — became the subject of violent 
sectional controversies in the later period. The rivalry of the sec- 
tions first showed itself in the fight for the presidency in 1824, It 
was not a contest of parties ; for since the fall of the Federalists in 
181 6 the nationalized Republican party had stood without a rival 
in the field, Monroe's reelection in 1820 was practically unanimous. 
But in 1824 there was no single candidate acceptable to East, West, 
and South. Instead, there was a group of remarkably able states- 
men who, in spite of their own desire to cherish the broad national 
spirit of the second decade of the century, found themselves drawn 
year by year into the more exclusive service of their sections. 

275. John Quincy Adams, 1767-1848. New England was repre- 
sented in this group by John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. 
The former was one of the best-trained statesmen in all our history. 
He was the son of the distinguished patriot and Federalist president, 
John Adams. As a boy of eleven he had accompanied his father on 
a diplomatic mission to Paris (1778), and during the next forty 
years had served his country in the capacity of secretary, minister, 
or special envoy at the courts of Russia, Prussia, the Netherlands, 
Sweden, France, and England. He served as United States senator 
from Massachusetts from 1803 to 1808, and President Monroe 

210 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 



211 



called him, in 1817, to the first place in his cabinet, a position which 
he filled with great success during the eight years of Monroe's ad- 
ministration. For all his cosmopolitan experience, Adams remained., 
a New England Puritan, and preserved to the end of his career.! 
the noble austerities and repelling virtues of the Puritan, — unswerv-l 
ing conscientiousness, unsparing self-judgment, unflagging industry, 
unbending dignity, unyielding devotion to duty. He rose before 
daylight, read his Bible with the regularity of an orthodox clergyman, 
and in his closely written diary of 
a dozen volumes recorded the af- 
fairs of his soul as faithfully as 
the affairs of state. 

276. Daniel Webster, 1782- 
1852. Daniel Webster, fifteen 
years Adams's junior, had by no 
means reached the latter's level as 
a statesman at the close of Mon- 
roe's administration. He had neither 
been a member of the cabinet nor 
filled a diplomatic post. The son of 
a sturdy New Plampshire farmer, 
he had secured a college education 
at Dartmouth, at some sacrifice to 
his family, and had amply justi- 
fied their faith in his promise by a brilliant legal career. In 1813 
he had been sent to Washington as congressman from a New Hamp- 
shire district. A few years later he moved his law office to Boston, 
and from 1823 to the middle of the century continued almost unin- 
terruptedly to represent the people of Massachusetts in the national 
House and Senate. By his famous plea in the Dartmouth College 
case, his Plymouth oration on the two-hundredth anniversary of the 
landing of the Pilgrims (1820), and his speeches in Congress, he 
had already won a national reputation as an orator before the close 
of Monroe's administration. When it was known that Webster was 
to speak, the gallery and floor of the Senate chamber would be 
crowded with a throng eager to sit or stand for hours under the spell 
of his sonorous and majestic voice. Like Adams, Webster inherited 
and appreciated New England's traditions of learning, and took just 




JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 



212 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

pride in the contribution of its Puritan stock to the mental and moral 
standard of our country ; but he was not a Puritan in temper and 
habits, like Adams, who wrote himself down in his diary as "a man 
of cold, austere, and forbidding manners." When Webster erred 
it was rather on the side of conviviality than of austerity. 

277. Albert Gallatin, 1761-1849. The Middle Atlantic region 
had two or three statesmen of first rank, besides scores of politicians 
who were contending for political influence. Albert Gallatin of 
Pennsylvania, a Swiss by birth, had been Secretary of the Treasury 
under Jefferson and Madison (1801-1813), had been with Adams 
and Clay on the commission which negotiated the peace with Eng- 
land in 1 8 14, and was serving as minister to France when he was 
persuaded to come home to take part in the campaign of 1824. 

278. Rufus King, 1755-1827. Rufus King, senator from New 
York, had, in his younger days, been one of the Massachusetts dele- 
gates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Three times since 
1800 he had been candidate for president or vice president on the 
Federalist ticket. At the time of Monroe's presidency he was one of 
the most eloquent antislavery orators in Congress. 

279. De Witt Clinton, 1769-1828. De Witt Clinton had been 
governor of New York for two terms, and in 181 2, as candidate of 
the Federalist party, he had seriously contested Madison's reelection. 
His monument is the great Erie Canal (opened in 1825), which runs 
through the Mohawk valley and, connecting with the Hudson, 
unites the waters of the Great Lakes with those of the Atlantic 
Ocean. But none of these men was an " available " candidate in 
1824. Gallatin was a nationalized foreigner. King had been standard 
bearer of the Federalists in their humiliating defeat of 181 6, and 
Clinton, besides the handicap of his old Federalist connections, was 
too much engrossed in the strife of factions in New York state to 
emerge as a national figure. 

280. William H. Crawford, 1772-1834. Among the brilliant 
group of orators and statesmen from the South, William H. Crawford 
of Georgia and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina stood preeminent. 
Crawford had a powerful mind in a powerful body. He entered the 
United States Senate in 1807, at the age of thirty-five, was made 
minister to France in 18 13, and was in the cabinet continuously as 
Secretary of War and of the Treasury from 181 5 to 1825. A most 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 



213 



^^^ 








accomplished politician, he came very near defeating Monroe for the 
Republican nomination for the presidency in 18 16, despite the iatter's 
hearty support by Madison. Crawford was retained by Monroe as 
the head of the Treasury Department, where he won from so high 
an authority as Gallatin the praise of having '' a most correct judg- 
ment and inflexible integrity." 

281. John C. Calhoun, 1782-1850. John C. Calhoun probably 
has even today but one rival in the hearts of Southern patriots, — 
the gallant warrior-gentleman, Robert 
E. Lee. Calhouii, just past thirty, was 
one of the brilliant group of " new 
men" in the Twelfth Congress, who 
in their national enthusiasm forced 
Madison to declare war on England in 
181 2, and followed the successful con- 
clusion of the war with the liberal 
legislation on army, bank, tariff, and 
internal improvements which we have 
studied in the preceding chapter. 
Monroe offered Calhoun the War port- 
folio in 18 1 7, and, like Adams and 
Crawford, the South Carolinian re- 
mained in the cabinet during both of 
Monroe's terms. Some of Calhoun's 
contemporaries feared that " the light- 
ning glances of his mind" and his passion for national expansion 
sometimes disturbed his solid judgment in these early years; but 
Adams, who sat for eight years at the same council board with him, 
described Calhoun in his diary as " fair and candid, of clear and 
quick understanding, cool self-possession, enlarged philosophical 
views, and ardent patriotism." 

282. Thomas H. Benton, 1782-1858. The West boasted of three 
men of national reputation in Benton, Clay, and Jackson, all of whom 
had emigrated from the South Atlantic States. Thomas Hart Benton, 
born in North Carolina in 1782, had gone west in early life to help 
build up the commonwealth of Tennessee; and, following the im- 
pulse of the pioneer, had continued farther to the trans-Mississippi 
frontier. In 182 1 he was sent by the new state of Missouri to the 




JOHN C. CALHOUN 



2 14 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

Senate, where he continued for thirty years to plead the cause of 
westward expansion with an almost savage enthusiasm. He de- 
nounced the '^surrender of Texas''^ to Spain in the treaty of 1819 
with all the zeal of an ancient prophet, and foretold the day when 
the valley of the Columbia River should be the granary of China 
and Japan. 

283. Henry Clay, 1777-1852. The name of Henry Cl^iy has 
already appeared frequently on these pages, for no account of the 
War of 181 2 and the system of national development which followed 
could be written without giving Clay the most conspicuous place. 
He was a born leader of men, adapting his genial personality to the 
humblest and roughest frontiersman without a sign of condescension^ 
and meeting the lofty demeanor of an Adams with an easy charm 
of manner. When still a young law student of nineteen Clay had 
migrated from Virginia, in 1796, to the new state of Kentucky, where 
his great gifts of leadership and marvelous oratory obtained for him in 
1806 a seat in the United States Senate before the legal age of thirty 
years. In 181 1 he entered the House, and as Speaker of the Twelfth 
Congress began a career of leadership in American politics which was 
to extend over four decades to his death in 1852. If Webster's voice 
was the most convincing that ever sounded in the halls of Congress, 
Henry Clay's was the most winning. He spoke to the hearts of men. 
He was not merely the ''choice" of his supporters; he was their 
idol. And when he was defeated for the high office of president, it 
is said men wept like children. 

284. Andrew Jackson, 1767-1845, Finally, in Andrew Jackson 
of Tennessee the Southwest had a hero of the pure American democ- 
racy. Jackson was born of Scotch-Irish parentage in the western 
uplands on the border of the Carolinas in 1767. He joined the tide 
of emigration to Tennessee, where his energy, pluck, and hard sense 
gained for him a foremost place in local politics, while his prowess 
as an Indian fighter won him a generalship in the War of 181 2. The 
victory of New Orleans (181 5) made Jackson the most conspicuous 
soldier of the republic, and the " conquest of Florida " in the Seminole 
War, three years later, brought him before the cabinet at Washington 

1 When the boundary treaty of 1S19 was concluded (see page 205) some of our statesmen 
claimed, but without right, that Texas, being a part of the Louisiana Purchase territory, was 
"sacrificed" or "surrendered" to Spain. 




Courtesy of the Long Island Historical Society 

HENRY CLAY 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 215 

and the court of Madrid as the decisive factor in the long negotia- 
tions over the Florida territory. Jackson was a man of action, not 
words. His bitter rival, Henry Clay, never tired of calling him a 
mere "military chieftain." Away back in Washington's administra- 
tion Jackson had entered Congress from the new state of Tennessee 
(1796) in his backwoodsman's dress, "a tall, lank, uncouth-looking 
personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and a cue 
down his back tied in an eelskin." Jefferson, who was president of 
the Senate when Jackson was a member of that body, in 1797-1798, 
said that he had often seen this violent member from Tennessee 
struggling in vain to speak on the floor, his voice completely choked 
by rage. But Jackson left the halls of Congress in 1798, not to re- 
turn for a full quarter of a century, — and then crowned with the 
laurels of his great victories and already the choice of the legislature 
of his state for president. 

285. The Election of 1824. Four of these "favorite sons" of the 
various sections of the country were rivals for the presidency in 1824, 
— General Jackson, Henry Clay, and Monroe's cabinet officers Adams 
and Crawford. During the whole of Monroe's second term these 
men were laying their plans to gain the coveted honor. Crawford 
secured the support of the congressional caucus,^ but candidates 
of the other sections were enthusiastically nominated by state legis- 
latures and mass meetings. It was the first popular presidential 
campaign in our history, abounding in personalities, cartoons, em- 
blems, banners, songs, speeches, and dinners. "Old hickory" clubs 
were formed for Jackson, and men wore black silk vests with his 
portrait stamped upon them. The support of the New England 
States was pledged to Adams ; Tennessee, Alabama, and Pennsyl- 
vania declared for Jackson ; and Clay secured the legislatures of 
Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, and Louisiana. In New York there was 
a battle royal, resulting in the distribution of the 36 electoral votes 
of the state among the four candidates. When the vote was formally 
counted it was found that Jackson had 99 votes, Adams 84, Craw- 
ford 41, and Clay 37. 

1 Since John Adams's day it had been customary for the members of each party to meet 
in a caucus, or conference, and select the candidates of their party for president and vice 
president. But by 1824 the increasing democratic sentiment of the country made this 
exclusive method of selecting presidential candidates unpopular. 



2i6 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

286. Adams chosen by the House. As no candidate had re- 
ceived the majority (more than half) of the electoral votes required 
by the Constitution for the choice of a president, the House of 
Representatives had to select from the three highest names on the 
list (Twelfth Amendment). Clay, being out of the race, decided 
quite naturally to throw his influence on the side of Adams, who was 
not, like Jackson, his rival in the West, and whose political views 
were much closer to his own on such questions as internal improve- 
ments, the tariff, the Bank, and other points of the ''American 
System," than were those of the "military chieftain" Jackson. 
Adams was chosen by the House, and immediately offered Clay the 
first place in his cabinet. The Jackson supporters were furious. 
The "will of the people" had been defeated, they said. The House 
was morally bound, they claimed, to choose the man who had the 
greatest number of electoral and popular votes. They declared that 
the aristocratic Adams and Henry Clay, " the Judas of the West," 
had entered into a "corrupt bargain" to keep the old hero of New 
Orleans out of the honors which the nation had clearly voted him. 
Jackson appealed from Congress to the people. He resigned his seat 
in the Senate, and with an able corps of managers in every section 
of the country began a four years' campaign against Adams, Clay, 
and the whole " dynasty of secretaries," to restore the government of 
the American republic to the ideals of its founders and to servants 
of the people's choice. 

An Era of Hard Feelings 

287. The Sections of our Country. With our present rapid 
means of transportation and communication by the railroad and the 
airplane, the telegraph and the telephone ; with our tremendous 
interstate commerce binding section to section ; with our network of 
banks and brokerage houses maintaining financial equilibrium be- 
tween the different parts of our country, we find it hard to realize 
the isolation and the consequent antagonism of the various geo- 
graphical sections in the early years of the nineteenth century. The 
wonder really is that our country held together as well as it did, 
and not that it tended to separate into sections. For in spite of 
the temporary unifying effect of the second war with Great Britain, 

\ it was not until the crisis of the great Civil War that the United 



( 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 217 

States became an assured Union. We shall better appreciate the 
United States of 1825 if we think of it as a huge geographical frame- 
work containing several distinct communities with widely differing 
social and industrial interests. 

288. New England. New England, with its two full centuries 
of Puritan history behind it, though at last outgrowing its religious 
narrowness, was still a very conservative region socially and politi- 
cally. It had been the last stronghold of Federalism, which stood, in 
John Adams's phrase, for government by '' the rich, the well born, and 
the able." It had never made the ballot common or office cheap. 
As its farming population was attracted westward to the rich lands 
of the Ohio valley,^ power was even more consolidated in the hands 
of the rich merchant and manufacturing classes on the seaboard. 
New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, without sharing 
the religious prejudices of New England, were generally allied with 
that region in their industrial and mercantile interests. 

289. The "Planter Aristocracy" in the South. To New Eng- 
land's aristocracy of merchants the South opposed an aristocracy of 
planters. The cultivation of cotton, increasing as we have seen at a 
marvelous rate in the early years of the nineteenth century, was 
rapidly fixing on the South an institution which was fraught with 
the gravest consequences for our country's history, — the institution 
of negro slavery. We shall discuss the political and ethical conse- 
quences of slavery in later chapters. Here we note simply the 
economic fact that the increase of negro slave labor in the South made 
free white labor impracticable, and with it shut out the possibility of 
the development of manufactures, which, since the second war with 
England, had been thriving in the Northern states. 

290. The Pioneer Community of the West. A third distinct 
section of our country, growing every year more conscious of its 
peculiar temper and its peculiar needs, was the West. To the mer- 
chant aristocracy of the East and the planter aristocracy of the 
South, the West opposed the rugged democracy of a pioneer com- 
munity. Men were scarce in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, 
and the Mississippi territory in the early days, and every man 

1 The influence of New England on the West may be seen in the fact that in 1830 
thirty-one members of Congress were natives of Connecticut, though the state itself sent 
but five members. 



2i8 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

counted. The artificial distinctions of name and education weighed 
but little compared with the natural distinctions of brawn and wit. 
The pioneer was rough, hardy, and self-reliant. He made his way 
with knife and gun. A convention at Knoxville for framing the con- 
stitution of Tennessee adopted the rule that any man who digressed 
from the discussion ^' in order to fall upon the person of another 
member " should be suppressed by the chair. Justice was summary. 
The feud and the duel often replaced the tedious processes of the 
courts. The test of a man was what he could do, not how much he 
knew. If he could manage a wild horse, drive an ax deep, and repel 
an Indian raid, he was the right kind of American ; and his vote 
and opinion were worth as much in this democratic country as those 
of any merchant in Boston. 

291. The New Democracy. The people of the Atlantic seaboard 
had all inherited European ideas of rank. They had, to be sure, 
developed a political democracy, but not a social one. They believed 
in a government jor the people and perhaps oj the people — but not 
by the people. In Washington's day only some 120,000 out of a 
population of nearly 4,000,000 had the right to vote, and religious ; 
or property qualifications were attached to the offices of govern- 
ment in almost all the states. But the new states of the West were 
all for manhood suffrage, without regard to birth, profession, or 
wealth. The time had now come when these states, with their 
immense growth in population, were conscious of their influence over 
the national government. In the words of Senator Benton of Mis- 
souri, they demanded " some share in the destinies of this republic." 

292. The Difficult Position of President Adams. The events 
of the period which we are studying can be understood only in the 
light of this sectional rivalry. The upright Adams met with op- 
position all through his term because he was unable to see or un- 
willing to encourage such rivalry. While his opponents were busy 
building up their party machine, Adams steadily refused to use his 
high position for such a purpose. He would not remove a man from c 
office for voting against the administration ; he would not appoint 

a man to office as a reward for services to the party. He declined 
to exchange the responsibilities of the statesman for the intrigues 
of the politician. He held to the policy of a strong national govern- 
ment controlling all parts of the country, just at the moment when 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 219 

these various parts were coming more and more keenly to realize 
their conflicting sectional interests. 

293. The Panama Congress. The affair of the Panama Congress 
is an excellent illustration of the frustration of the national ideas of 
Adams and Clay by sectional interests. The newly liberated re- 
publics of Mexico, Colombia, and Central America, whose inde- 
pendence the United States had guaranteed in the Monroe Doctrine, 
decided to hold a congress on the Isthmus of Panama for the purpose 
of forming a league to oppose the aggressions of Spain or any other 
European nation. A courteous invitation was sent to the United 
States in the autumn of 1825 to participate in this congress. But 
the slaveholding states of the South saw in it a grave danger. The 
revolt of the Spanish colonies had been accompanied by a movement 
in favor of slave emancipation. If Cuba and Porto Rico were added ' 
to the new group of republics, it would mean the liberation of the 
slaves of those islands. If Haiti, already a free negro republic, were 
admitted to the congress, we should be logically forced to welcome 
its ministers to our country. ''The peace of eleven states of this 
Union," said a Southern member of Congress, '' will not permit black 
consuls and ambassadors to establish themselves in our cities and 
parade through our country, and give their fellow blacks in the 
United States proof in hand of the honors which await them for a 
like successful insurrection on their part." After a long and bitter 
debate the names of the two envoys whom Adams had appointed to 
represent us at the Panama Congress were confirmed in the Senate 
by the close vote of 24 to 19. But it was a fruitless victory. One 
of the envoys died on the way to Panama, and the other reached 
his destination only to find the congress adjourned. 

294. The Failure of the "American Policy." The Adams-Clay 
policy of internal improvements at national expense met the same sec- 
tional opposition. The President praised the spirit of New York State 
in completing the Erie Canal (1825) and tried to stimulate Congress 
by this example to the " accomplishment of works important to the 
whole country, to which neither the authority nor the resources of 
any one state could be adequate." But the tide of opinion was 
running strongly against him. The West replied, Let the government 
give us the lands which are now being bought up by Eastern specu- 
lators, and we will take care of our own development. And the 



2 20 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

South said, Let the government reduce the tariff duties which are 
enriching the Northern merchants at our expense, and it will not 
have so much money to spend " in charity " on roads and canals.^ 

295. Georgia defies the Administration. Even a single state 
defied the national policy of the administration. Georgia had for 
several years been hindered in its development by the presence of 
the large and powerful nations of Creek and Cherokee Indians on 
its fertile soil. The United States had promised as early as 1802 
to remove these Indians, but they were still there when Adams 
became president in 1825. Clay negotiated a treaty with the In- 
dians, giving them the occupancy of the land till 1827. But Governor 
Troup of Georgia had already begun to survey the lands as state 
property. Adams warned the governor against interfering with '' the 
faith of the nation " toward the Indians ; but Troup replied that 
Georgia was ^^ sovereign on her own soil " and notified the Secretary 
of War that he would '^resist by force the first act of hostility on 
the part of the United States, the unblushing ally of the savages.'' 
To Adams's chagrin the Senate refused to support him in forcing 
Georgia to obedience, and Governor Troup proceeded with his surveys. 

296. Our Manufacturing Interests. These examples of the 
Panama fiasco, the failure of the policy of internal improvements, and 
the successful defiance of the government by the state of Georgia 
show how rapidly sectional interests were replacing the national en- 
thusiasm of the two previous administrations. But the most striking 
example of all was the quarrel over the tariff. When we were drawn 
into the struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain, and our 
shipping was destroyed by embargoes, nonintercourse, and war 

1 The failure of the so-called "American policy " of government aid for improvements 
in transportation is seen in its true significance when we remember that it was just at this 
epoch that the great railway systems of our country were begun. The Mohawk and Hud- 
son Railway (parent of the New York Central) was started in 1825, the Boston and Albany 
and the Pennsylvania in 1827, and the Baltimore and Ohio in 182S. These railways soon 
superseded the canals as routes of transportation and have now grown into several vast 
systems of trunk lines and branches, with 250,000 miles of track, — enough to circle the earth 
ten times. They are owned and until the entrance of the United States into the World War 
were managed by private corporations, chartered by the state governments. The Pennsylvania 
system, for example, has between thirty and forty charters granted by a dozen states. Who 
can calculate the effect on the economic and political history of our country if the construc- 
tion and management of railways had been adopted as part of the national government's 
business in John Quincy Adams's administration, and if Congress had maintained the same 
control over the steel Hnes of land transportation that it has over the rivers and harbors of 
the United States ! 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 221 

(1807-1815), the merchants of the country began to put their capital 
into manufactures. Cotton, woolen, and paper mills, tanneries, fur- 
niture factories, iron forges, glass and pottery works, sprang up. 
At the close of the war with England (181 5) there was close to 
$100,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries in this country, 
giving employment to 200,000 workers. Just at the same moment 
the return of universal peace in Europe found Great Britain with 
an immense amount of manufactured goods on her hands, which had 
accumulated while the ports of the Continent were closed to her 
commerce by Napoleon's decrees (p. 180). These goods Great 
Britain proceeded to ''dump" on the United States at low prices, to 
glut our markets and, as Lord Brougham put it, ''to stifle in the 
cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the war 
had forced into existence." In the single year of 181 6, $90,000,000 
worth of goods were sent over to this country. 

297. The Tariff of 1816. Hatred of England and patriotic pride 
in our own new industries, coniidence in our destiny as a great manu- 
facturing people, the self-interest of the manufacturers, and the con- 
viction that " to be independent for the comforts of life," as Thomas 
Jefferson said, "we must fabricate them ourselves, putting manu- 
factures by the side of agriculture," — all combined to cause the 
passage in 181 6 of a tariff bill which not only continued the high 
duties levied for the extraordinary war expenses in 181 2 but even 
increased the rates by 15 or 20 per cent. All sections of our country 
contributed to the passage of this bill (see map, p. 223), for, al- 
though less than 5 per cent of the manufactures of the country 
were in the states south of Virginia in 181 6, nevertheless these 
states hoped to build up mills and factories like those of the North. 

298. The Protective Tariff of 1824. But the tariff of 1816 did 
not stop the flood of importations from England, and the manufac- 
turers in the Northern states begged Congress to save them from ruin 
by laying still higher duties. Tariff bills increasing the rates were 
introduced into the House in 1820, 1821, and 1823, but it was not 
till 1824 that a new tariff passed the House by the narrow majority 
of 107 to 102 votes, and the Senate by a vote of 25 to 22. The 
tariff of 1824 raised the average duty from 20 per cent to 36 per 
cent. Since our revenues from the tariff of 1816 were more than 
ample for running the government, and a large surplus was piling 



22 2 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

up in the treasury, this additional tariff of 1824 was purely "pro- 
tective"; that is, to protect the prices of our goods against competi- 
tion from England, where labor was cheaper and more abundant, and 
the processes of manufacture were more advanced'. 

299. Antitariff Sentiment in the South. Moreover, the tariff 
of 1824 was purely sectional, only three votes being cast for it south 
of the Potomac and Cumberland Rivers. For the South had dis- 
covered in the years since 1816 that it was not destined to become 
a manufacturing region and thus to share in the benefits of a pro- 
tective tariff. The extension of the cotton area to Alabama, Mis- 
sissippi, and Louisiana, and the immense leap in cotton exportation 
from 60,000,000 pounds in 181 6 to 200,000,000 pounds in 1824, 
made it certain that the South would continue to devote itself to 
the production of this agricultural staple by slave labor. Without 
manufactures, then, or hope of manufactures, the South saw itself 
taxed by the tariff to support the mills and factories of the North. 
The price of raw cotton was constantly falling, owing to the great 
increase of the crop, and the cost of manufactured goods for which 
the South exchanged its cotton was constantly rising, owing to the 
increasing tariff. The planter had to buy food and clothing for his 
slaves, and the tariff raised the price of these necessities so high 
that John Randolph wittily said that unless the rates were lowered 
in a short time, instead of the masters advertising for fugitive slaves, 
the South would see the slaves searching for their fugitive masters. 
Under this economic pressure the South, in spite of its votes for the 
tariff of 181 6, now challenged the right of Congress to levy a pro- 
tective tariff at all. The Constitution gave Congress the right to 
raise a revenue, the objectors said, but not to levy a tax on the 
industries of one part of the country to protect the industries of 
another part. The North, with its system of free labor and small 
farms, inviting industry at home and immigration from abroad, was 
rapidly outgrowing the South in population. Hence its majority was 
constantly increasing in the House of Representatives. If the North- 
ern majority in Congress were to be allowed to pass measure after 
measure for the benefit of their own section, the South would be 
"reduced to the condition of a subject province." 

300. The "Tariff of Abominations." When a still higher pro- 
tective tariff was demanded by the Northern woolen and iron 



SECTIONAL INTERESTS 



223 



manufacturers in 182 7, the South protested. Thomas Cooper, president 
of South Carolina College, declared in a fiery speech that when the 
"Massachusetts lords of the spinning jenny and peers of the loom" 
presumed by virtue of their majority in Congress to tax the South, it 
was " high time to calculate the value of the Union." The Southerners 
were not strong enough to keep a new high tariff bill out of Congress 
in 1828, but they resorted to a shrewd trick to defeat it. Instead 
of seeking to lower the tariff rates proposed, they joined with the 



1816 




THE VOTE ON THE TARIFF BILLS OF 1816 AND 1828 



Western farmers in greatly increasing them. A presidential election 
was approaching, and the South appealed to the large anti-Adams 
sentiment to frame a tariff bill so preposterous that New England 
would reject it, and so bring dishonor and defeat upon Adams's cause. 
For example. New England wanted a high duty on manufactured 
woolens to exclude English goods, but at the same time it wanted 
cheap raw wool for its factories. It wanted a high duty on cordage 
to protect its shipbuilding industries, but it wanted cheap raw hemp 
for its ropewalks. It wanted a high duty on iron manufactures, but 
cheap pig iron for its forges. All New England's demands for pro- 
tection to manufactures were granted in the bill, but their benefits 
were largely neutralized by the addition of high duties on raw wool 



2 24 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

to please the sheep raisers of Ohio, on hemp to satisfy the farmers 
of Kentucky, and on pig iron to conciliate the miners of Pennsylvania. 
In spite of this shrewd plan of the South to match the West against 
New England, and thus to please nobody by pleasing everybody, the 
fantastic bill passed the House, by a vote of 105 to 94, the Senate 
by a vote of 26 to 21, and became a law by President Adams's signa- 
ture (May 19, 1828). 

301. Calhoun's "Exposition and Protest." The "Tariff of 
Abominations," as this bill was called, was one of the most outrageous 
pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress, It was a low political 
job, which, as Randolph said, " had to do with no manufactures ex- 
cept the manufacture of a president." It was not even (like the bill 
of 1824) the honest expression of a section of the country. The 
South was indignant. Flags were flown at half-mast in Charleston. 
Orators advised boycotting all trade with the protected states and 
even advocated the resignation of the Southern members from Con- 
gress. Senator Hayne of South Carolina wrote to Jackson that 
nineteen twentieths of the men of his state were convinced that the 
protective tariff would ruin the South and destroy the Union. North 
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi joined in the protest. 
Vice President Calhoun, on his return from Washington to Charles- 
ton, wrote and presented to the legislature of his state the famous 
attack on the "Tariff of Abominations," called the "Exposition and 
Protest." Calhoun maintained, first, that the tariff act of 1828 was 
unconstitutional, since Congress had the power to lay taxes only 
for a revenue ; secondly, that the act was sectional, since by it the 
South, which had but one third of the votes in the House (76 out 
of 213), paid over two thirds of the customs duties; and thirdly, 
that, as our government was an agreement or compact between the 
states, the national government created by that compact could not 
be superior to the states in sovereignty and could not be itself the 
judge of what its proper powers were. The states, which had be- 
stowed on Congress its powers, were the ultimate judges of whether 
or not Congress was overstepping those powers. And hence, at 
any time, a state might challenge an act of Congress and appeal to 
its sister states for the verdict. Congress must then secure th'e votes 
of three fourths of the states in ratification of an amendmer.it giving 
it the express power in dispute. 



m SECTIONAL INTERESTS 225 

302. The Election of Andrew Jackson. The presidential elec- 
tion of 1828 took place a few weeks before Calhoun presented his 
^'Exposition." The Republican party was still the only one in the 
iield, but its two wings had drawn so far apart that new names were 
aiecessary to denote them. The supporters of the policy of Adams 
and Clay (high tariff, national improvements, strong central govern- 
ment) were called National-Republicans ; while the opposition forces, 
led by Calhoun, Crawford, and Jackson, revived the original party 
name of Democratic-Republicans. Jackson's victory over Adams 
in the election of 1828 was overwhelming; he carried every state 
west of the Alleghenies and south of Maryland, besides Pennsyl- 
vania and the majority of the votes of New York. His victory was 
hailed as the triumph of democratic principles, an assertion of " the 
people's right to govern themselves." 

303. A Truce on the Tariff. Calhoun advised South Carolina 
to wait, before taking any radical steps, to see what Jackson would 
do. A Southerner and a slaveholder, the recipient of their unanimous 
vote for the presidency, he must, thought the men of the South, 
reverse the iniquitous tariff policy of his predecessor. So the com- 
mercial North and the agricultural South stood facing each other 
in a hostile truce, while ''the people" invaded the White House on 
inauguration day, standing with muddy cowhide boots on the damask- 
covered chairs, spilling orange punch on the carpets, and almost suf- 
focating the old ''Hero of New Orleans" as they pressed round 
him to shake his hand and declare that his inauguration was the 
inauguration of the rule of American democracy pure and undefiled. 

References 

The Favorite Sons: E. E. Sparks, The Men who made the Nation, chaps, 
viii-x; J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. 
V, chap, xhi; Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, chap, xi; J. W. 
Burgess, The Middle Period, chap, vij F. J. Turner, The Rise of the New 
West ('Vmerican Nation), chaps, xi, xv; also The Frontier in American History 
(in American Historical Association Reports, Vol. Ill, pp. 197-227) ; Allen 
Johnson, Union and Democracy (Riverside History of U. S., Vol. II), chap, 
xvii; biographies of John Quincy Adams (by Morse), Benton (by Roosevelt), 
Webster (by Lodge), Gallatin (by Stevens), Clay (by Schurz), Jackson (by 
Sumner), and Calhoun (by Von Holst), in the American Statesmen Series. 

An Era of Hard Feelings: McMaster, Vol. V, chaps, xlvi, li-liii; Turner, 
chaps, xviii, xix; Burgess, chaps, vii, viii; Woodrow Wilson, Division and 



2 26 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

Reunion, chap, i; Johnson, chap, xviii; H. von Holst, Constitutional History 
of the United States, Vol. I, chap, xi; D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the 
United States, chap, viii; F. W. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 
chap, ii; Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, chap, viii; J. F. Rhodes, 
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, pp. 40-53 ; 
Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, pp. 374-380; William MacDonald, 
Select Documents of United States History, 1776-1S61, Nos. 44, 45 (for text 
of tariff protests). 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. Thomas H. Benton's Prophecies of Western Growth: McM.'^ster, 
Vol. V, pp. 24-27; W. M. Meigs, Life of Thomas Hart Benton, pp. 90-103; 
Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hart Benton, pp. 50-58; Thomas H. Benton, 
Thirty Years' View, Vol. I, pp. 13, 14; H. A. Bruce, Romance of American 
Expansion, pp. 106-122. 

2. The Selection of a Presidential Candidate: F. W. Dallinger, Nomi- 
nations for Elective Office, pp. 13-48; McMaster, Vol. V, pp. 55-67; M. I. 
OsTROGORSKi, Democracy and the Party System in the United States, pp. 3-16; 
Stanwood, History of the Presidency, pp. 125-132; J. A. Woodburn, Politi- 
cal Parties and Party Problems in the United States, pp. 165-196; James 
Bryce, The American Commonwealth (abridged edition), pp. 465-485; C. A. 
Beard, Readings in American Government and Politics, Nos. 46-50. 

3. The Panama Congress: Burgess, pp. 147-155; Von Holst, Vol. I, pp. 
409-433 ; J. D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. II, pp. 
318-329; McMaster, Vol. V, pp. 433-459; A. B. Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, 
No. 150; Benton, Vol. I, pp. 65-69. 

4. The Arguments for a Protective Tariff: Dewey, pp. 191-196; Taus- 
sig, pp. 1-67; W. M. Grosvenor, Does Protection Protect? pp. 176-201; 
Henry George, Protection or Free Trade, pp. 88-120, 154-230.; Edward Tay- 
lor, Is Protection a Benefit? pp. 96-173, 206-232; A. Maurice Low, Pro- 
tection in the United States, pp. 40-59, 94-119; H. R. Seager, Introduction to 
Economics, pp. 371-383; also article "Protection," in the New International 
Encyclopedia. 



22 8 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

he drew the hasty and unwarranted conclusion that all who were 
opposed to him were enemies of that country. He was seldom 
without a personal quarrel, and, like all combative natures, he often 
lacked the judgment to know what causes were worth a controversy 
and what were not. His partisan temperament acted like a strong 
chemical reagent, bringing out the political color of every mind with 
which it came into contact. Everybody had to take sides for or 
against Andrew Jackson. Least of all our presidents — less even 
than Lincoln or Roosevelt — did he sink his personality in his office. 
He dominated the office and even scouted its traditions. He made 
it Jacksonian. With all his rancor against the ''effete dynasties" 
and "pampered minions" of Europe, he often conducted himself 
more like a monarch than like the sworn defender of a democratic 
constitution ; so that his presidency has been called '' the reign of 
Andrew Jackson." 

306. His Lack of Consistency. A will so absolute as Jackson's 
could have little regard for consistency. In 1816 he had written to 
President-elect Monroe that party spirit was a monstrous thing, 
unworthy of a great and free nation ; yet when he himself came 
into office in 1829 he showed himself the most partisan president 
our country has ever had. Between his inauguration in March and 
the meeting of his first Congress in December he removed over a 
thousand government officials in order to make places for men who 
had supported his campaign, whereas all the previous presidents had 
together made less than a hundred political removals. He had pro- 
tested vigorously against allowing any micmber of Congress to be 
appointed to an executive office, yet he himself chose four out of 
the six members of his first cabinet from Congress. In each of his 
annual messages he advised against a second term, yet he allowed 
himself, after his first year of office, to be announced through the 
administration newspapers at Washington and elsewhere as a candi- 
date for reelection in 1832. He poured out his wrath on the leaders 
of the preceding administration for " crooked politics," " corrupt bar- 
gains," jobbery, and underhand methods ; yet he himself carried 
on his government almost exclusively with the help of shrewd news- 
paper editors and devoted partisans in minor public offices. Even 
the official cabinet, with the exception of Van Bu'ren, was ignored in 
favor of a group of unofficial advisers called the kitchen cabinet. 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 229 

307. His Indifference to the Tariff. As for the antitariff men 
of the South, they got small comfort from Jackson. In his first 
message he scarcely mentioned the tariff, and in his next one (Decem- 
ber, 1830), while admitting that the tariff was "too high on some of 
the comforts of life," he nevertheless declared both that Congress had 
the right to levy a protective tariff and that the policy of protection 
was desirable. Meanwhile an event had occurred in the United 
States Senate which greatly inflamed the hostile feelings of North 
and South and hastened South Carolina into a policy of defiance. 

308. The Debate on the Public Lands. The sale of public lands 
in the West was an important source of income to the national gov- 
ernment. The low price of these lands tempted speculators to buy 
them up and hold them for a rise in price. Accordingly Senator 
Foote of Connecticut, in December, 1829, proposed a resolution to 
the effect that no more public land should be put on the market for 
a time. The Southern and Western members of Congress attributed 
this motion to the selfish spirit of the Eastern merchants, who, they 
said, wanted to stop migration to the West in order to keep a mass 
of cheap laborers for their factories, just as they wanted high duties 
to protect the output of those factories. During the debate Robert 
Hayne of South Carolina left the specific subject under discussion, 
namely, the land sales, to rebuke the attitude of the North in general 
and of Massachusetts in particular. He accused the Bay State of 
having shown a narrow, selfish, sectional spirit from the earliest days 
of the republic. He declared that the only way to preserve the Union 
of free republics, which the " fathers " wished this country to be, 
■was to resist the economic tyranny of the manufacturing states, which 
had got control of Congress. The proper method of resistance had 
already been set forth by Calhoun in his "Exposition." 

309. Daniel Webster's Reply to Hayne. Daniel Webster replied 
to Hayne in an oration which is considered the greatest speech ever 
delivered in the halls of Congress (January 26-27, 1830). After 
defending Massachusetts against the charge of sectionalism, Webster 
went on to develop the theory of the national government as opposed 
to the mere league of states which the Southern orators advocated. 
Not the states, he claimed, but the people of the nation had made 
the Union. "It is, sir, the people's Constitution, the people's gov- 

, ernment, made for the people, made by the people, answerable to 



230 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

the people." If Congress e.Yceeded its powers, there was an arbiter 
appointed by the Constitution itself, namely, the Supreme Court,, 
which had the authority to declare laws null and void. This authority ' 
could not be vested in a state or a group of states. Pennsylvania i 
would annul one law, Alabama another, Virginia a third, and so on„ 
Our national legislature would then become a mockery, and our Con- 
stitution, instead of a strong instrument of government, would be a 
mere collection of topics for endless dispute between the sections of 
our country. The Union would fall apart. The states would return to 
the frightful condition of anarchy which followed the Revolutionary^ 
War, and our flag, " stained with the blood of fratricidal war," would 
float over "^ the dismembered fragments of our once glorious empire."' 

310. Jackson defends the Union. The echoes of Webster's J 
speech were still ringing through the land when President Jackson, 
gave a public and unmistakable expression of his view of nullification. 
At a dinner in celebration of Jefferson's birthday (April 13), Jackson 
responded to a call for a toast with the sentiment, ''Our federal 
Union — it must be preserved ! " The vice president, Calhoun, im- 
mediately responded with the toast, " Liberty dearer than Union ! " 
Feeling was intense. For the party of Hayne and Calhoun the Union 
had become a menace to liberty ; for the party of Jackson and Web- 
ster it was the only condition and guarantee of liberty. When the 
advocates of nullification in South Carolina were warned by the 
Union men that their course might bring war, they contemptuously 
asked these "submission men" whether the "descendants of the 
heroes of 1776 should be afraid of war! " 

311. South Carolina annuls the Tariff Acts. In the summer of 
1832 a new tariff bill was passed by Congress. Its rates were some- 
what lower than those of the "Tariff of Abominations," but still it 
was highly protective. The Southern members of Congress wrote 
home from Washington that no help was to be expected from that 
quarter. A convention met at Columbia in November, 1832, and by 
the decisive vote of 136 to 26 declared the tariff acts of 1828 and 
1832 "null, void, and no law." The people of the state were ordered 
to pay no duties under these laws after February i, 1833. At the same 
time the convention declared that any attempt by Congress to enforce 
the tariff law in South Carolina, to close her ports or destroy her 
commerce, would be a just cause for the secession of the state from 




< 
o 

H 
>^ 

W 



H 
tn 
eq 
W 



'^THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 2jr 

the Union. Governor Hamilton called for 10,000 volunteer troops to 
defend the state. Jackson answered in a strong proclamation. " I 
consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by 
one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, . , . incon- 
sistent with every principle on which the Constitution was founded, 
and destructive of the great object for which it was formed." To Poin- 
sett, collector of the port of Charleston, he wrote, " In forty days I will 
have 40,000 men in the state of South Carolina to enforce the law." 

312. Clay's Compromise Tariff. Calhoun, who had resigned the 
vice presidency to enter the Senate, now called on Clay to help in 
reconciling South Carolina's claims with the preservation of the 
Union. Clay, who had little desire to see the '^military chieftain" 
in the White House directing 40,000 men against South Carolina, 
worked out a compromise tariff, according to which the duties were 
to be reduced gradually, until in 1842 they should reach the level 
of the tariff act of 1816. Clay's compromise tariff passed both 
Houses of Congress and was signed by Jackson, March 2, 1833, at 
the same moment with a " Force Bill," which gave the President the 
right to employ the army and navy of the United States to collect 
the duties in South Carolina. 

313. Civil Strife Averted. The protesting state accepted the 
compromise tariff, and by a vote of 153 to 4 the convention rescinded 
the ordinance of nullification (March 15, 1833). Each side claimed the 
victory, — South Carolina for having compelled Congress to lower 
the tariff, and the United States for having forced South Carolina 
to retract the ordinance of nullification. Jackson's strong hand had 
preserved the Union, but his words had not restored unity between 
the warring sections. The language of nullification was not forgot- 
ten in South Carolina. Twenty-eight years later it was revived and 
intensified in a struggle far more serious than that over tariff rates, 
— the great slavery controversy which precipitated the Civil War. 

The War on the Bank 

314. The Second National Bank. Two days after signing the 
compromise tariff of 1833 Jackson was inaugurated president a second 
time. He had defeated Clay, the National-Republican candidate, in 
a campaign fought on the recharter of the National Bank. The Bank. 



232 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

of the United States was very prosperous at the beginning of Jack- 
son's administration. In addition to $8,000,000 of the public money, 
it held some $6,000,000 in deposits of private persons. It made 
a profit of $3,000,000 a year, from which it paid handsome dividends 
to its stockholders. Its shares of $100 par value sold frequently as 
high as $140 each. " Besides the parent bank at Philadelphia, with 
its marble palace and hundreds of clerks," says Parton in his ''Life 
of Andrew Jackson," " there were twenty-five branches in the towns 
and cities of the Union, each of which had its president, cashier, 
and board of directors. The employees of the Bank were more than 
five hundred in number, all men of standing and influence, and 
liberally salaried. In every county of the Union, in every nation on 
the globe, were stockholders of the Bank of the United States. . . . 
One fourth of its stock was held by women, orphans, and trustees 
of charity funds — so high and unquestioned was its credit." Its 
notes passed as gold, not only in every part of the Union but in the 
distant cities of London, St. Petersburg, Cairo, and Calcutta as well. 
315. Opposition to the Bank. The opponents of the Bank saw 
how great a hold such an institution could get on the government 
by showing it financial favors in time of stress, and what an influence 
it could wield in politics by contributions from its vast wealth to the 
election of candidates favorable to its interests.^ That the govern- 
ment should charter such an institution, they said, was contrary to 
the principles of democracy. It was encouraging corruption in public 
life by favoring the rich, instead of standing for equal rights and 
equal protection for all. Jackson was naturally a bitter opponent 
of the Bank. In his first message to Congress (December, 1829), 
although the charter of the Bank had still seven years to run, he 
spoke disparagingly of it. " Both the constitutionality and the 
expediency of the law creating this Bank," he wrote, " are well ques- 
tioned by a large portion of our fellow citizens." Jackson's sus- 
picions of the political corruption exercised by the Bank were much 
strengthened by the fact that most of the officers of that institution 
were his political (5pponents. The hostility of President Jackson 
injured the credit of the Bank. Its stocks fell in price, and its 

1 The managers of the Bank actually confessed that they spent ^58,000 of its funds in the 
campaign to elect Henry Clay in 1S32. This was after Jackson had, vetoed the bill for the 
Bank's recharter, however. 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 233 

managers began to fear that its business would be ruined. Therefore 
its president, Nicholas Biddle, acting on the advice of Clay, Webster, 
and other friends, applied to Congress early in 1832 for a renewal 
of the charter. The bill passed the House by a vote of 107 to 86. 

316. Jackson vetoes the Bank Bill. It was the year of the presi- 
dential election. Clay, who was Jackson's opponent, urged the appli- 
cation for a recharter of the Bank in order to make campaign 
material. He thought that Jackson would not dare to veto the bill 
for fear of losing his support in the Northern states, where the Bank 
was in favor. But Clay was mistaken in thinking that Jackson would 
not dare to do what he had determined to do, whether he gained 
the presidency or not. Jackson promptly sent back the bill with a 
veto message which, as Clay wrote to Biddle, had " all the fury of a 
chained panther biting the bars of his cage." In his veto Jackson de- 
nounced the Bank as a dangerous monopoly, managed by a " favored 
class of opulent citizens," interfering with the free exercise of the 
people's will and bending the government to its selfish purposes. 
Furthermore, the Bank was keeping the West poor by concentrating 
the money of the country in the Eastern cities. The Supreme Court 
had declared, in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland (p. 199), that 
Congress had the right to charter the Bank. Jackson made short 
work of this argument by the astonishing statement that the presi- 
dent's opinion of what was constitutional was as good as the Supreme 
Court's. "Each public officer," he wrote, "who takes an oath to sup- 
port the Constitution swears that he will support it as he under- 
stands it. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over 
Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on 
that point the President is independent of both." 

317. The Removal of the Deposits. Clay was never more mis- 
taken than when he appealed to the people to defeat Andrew Jackson 
on the issue of the National Bank. Jackson was overwhelmingly 
elected in November, 1832, with 219 electoral votes to Clay's 49. 
Even Pennsylvania gave her 30 electoral votes to Jackson, though 
only one of the Pennsylvania congressmen had voted against the 
bill for recharter-ing the Bank. Interpreting his reelection as a 
mandate from the American people to destroy the Bank, Jackson 
began his attack on the institution. A special committee appointed 
to examine the financial condition of the Bank reported it sound, 



234 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

and both Houses of Congress voted their confidence in the institu- 
tion. But this only increased the President's determination to destroy 
it. Taking advantage of a clause in the charter of the Bank which 
gave the Secretary of the Treasury the right to discontinue the 
government deposits in the Bank, if he gave his reasons to Congress, 
Jackson instructed Secretary Taney ^ to issue the order that after 
October i, 1833, the government should no longer use the Bank of 
the United States for its deposits, but would place its revenues in 
certain state banks (called from this order the ^'pet banks") in 
various parts of the country. 

318. Jackson censured by Senate. All this happened during the 
recess of Congress. When the Senate met, it voted that the reasons 
given by Taney for removing the deposits from the Bank of the 
United States were "unsatisfactory and insufficient," and refused 
to confirm the appointment of Taney as Secretary of the Treasury. 
Furthermore, by a vote of 26 to 20, it spread upon its journal a 
formal censure of Andrew Jackson, to the effect that " the President, 
in the late executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue 
[had] assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by 
the Constitution and the laws, but in derogation of both," The 
censure was unmerited, for the President had not exceeded his power 
in dismissing a cabinet officer, neither had the Secretary of the 
Treasury, in ceasing to make government deposits in the Bank. The 
censure was also illegal, for the only way the Senate can condemn 
the president is to convict him in a regular trial after he has been im- 
peached by the House of Representatives. Jackson with perfect right 
protested against the censure ; but it was only after a hard fight of 
three years that his champion in the Senate, Thomas H. Benton, 
succeeded in getting the offensive vote expunged from the journal. 

319. A Critical Moment in our Econoniic History. Jackson's 
overthrow of the Bank of the United States was undoubtedly approved 
by the majority of American citizens as the removal of a dangerous 
influence in our political life. The act would probably have had 
little effect on the business of the country had it not come at a 
critical moment in our industrial development. The period just 

1 Jackson removed one Secretary of the Treasury (McLane) by promoting him to the 
State Department, and accepted the resignation of another (Duane), before he found in 
Taney a Secretary willing to carry out his order. 



''THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 235 

following Jackson's second election was one of overconfidence in 
our country's growth. Our foreign trade was large. The country 
was out of debt, and the customs duties were bringing a large 
surplus into the Treasury every year. The recent introduction of 
the steam engine running on iron rails promised to revolutionize the 
whole system of slow transportation by river, cart, and canal. In- 
dividuals, stock companies, and state governments were anxious to 
borrow large sums of money to invest in land, labor, and building 
and transportation supplies, believing that we were on the eve of a 
marvelous "boom" in real estate and commerce. 

320. The Fever of Speculation in Western Lands. The new 
Western states vied with each other in patriotic projects of extension. 
For example, Indiana, whose population in 1836 was only about 
500,000, undertook to build 1200 miles of railroad through her forests 
and farm lands, thereby contracting a debt of $20 a head for every 
man, woman, and child in the state. Banks multiplied in the West, 
facilitating rash investments by lending on easy terms.^ These 
"wildcat" banks, as they were called, issued notes far beyond the 
legitimate business needs of the country and far beyond their real 
capital in gold and silver. This great increase of the amount of 
currency put into circulation was mistaken for an increase in the 
country's wealth. The fever of speculation reached its height in the 
purchase of Western lands. In 1834 less than $5,000,000 worth of 
land was sold by the United States government. Next year the sales 
jumped to $14,000,000, and the following year to $24,000,000. 

321. The Specie Circular. The purchasers paid for their lands 
in the paper money of the unreliajale Western banks, and the United 
States Treasury was soon overflowing with this depreciating currency. 
In the summer of 1836 Jackson issued his famous Specie Circular, 
forbidding the officers of the Treasury of the United States to accept 
any money but gold and silver (specie) in payment for further sales 
of public land. 

322. The Panic of 1837. The Specie Circular was the needle 
that pricked the bubble of speculation. The "wildcat" banks did 
not have the gold and silver to pay for the notes they had issued. 

1 In 1829 there were 329 of these state banks in the West, and by 1837 the number had 
reached 788. The hope of getting a share of the United States funds denied to the National 
Bank was a great stimulus to the state banking business. 



236 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

Speculators could not borrow "hard money" on such easy terms 
as they had borrowed paper ; and the '' boom" of the West collapsed.^ 
Land sales dropped to less than $900,000 for the year 1837. Build- 
ing operations ceased. Long lines of rails were left to rust in the 
Western forests. Thousands of laborers were thrown out of em- 
ployment. The New York Era reported nine tenths of the factories 
in the Eastern states closed by September, 1837. The distress of 
industrial depression following this financial panic was increased by 
the general failure of the crops in the summers of 1836 and 1837. 
The Hessian fly ravaged the wheat fields of Maryland, Virginia, and 
Pennsylvania, and the price of flour rose to $12 a barrel. The 
starving populace of New York and Philadelphia rioted. Mobs 
broke into the warehouses where the flour was stored and threw the 
precious barrels into the street. Over 600 banks went down in 
failure, including the 50 or more "pet banks" that held the govern- 
ment's deposits. Our credit abroad was almost ruined. Foreign 
trade languished. At the close of the period of depression the 
Treasury showed a deficit of over $10,000,000. 

323. The Independent-Treasury System. Five or six years 
passed before the country fully recovered from the panic of 1837 ^^^ 
confidence returned to merchants, bankers, and investors. The gov- 
ernment did not again intrust its funds to either a National Bank or 
the "pet banks" of the states. The former had been condemned 
as politically corrupt ; the latter had proved themselves financially 
unsound. A system of government deposit was adopted under Jack- 
son's successor, Van Buren (1840), which completely separated the 
public funds from the banking business in any form. This was called 
the Independent-Treasury or the Subtreasury system. The govern- 
ment constructed vaults in several of the larger cities of the country 
— New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Charlestori, New 
Orleans — and stored its revenues in these vaults. It was not until 
the Civil War that our government, under the stress of enormous 
expenses, was again obliged to appeal to the financial institutions of 
the country. It then devised the present system of national banks, 
to which we shall refer in a later chapter. 

1 The citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, presented a memorial to the Senate in which they 
said : " Had a large invading army passed triumphantly through our country it could not 
have so completely marred our prosperity. The countenances of our citizens are more 
gloomy and desponding than when the dread cholera was amongst us." 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 237 

A New Party 

324. Important Events of the Jacksonian Era. Although the 
contest with South Carolina over nullification and the war on the 
United States Bank were the two most important events in Jackson's 
administrations, both illustrating vividly the domineering character 
of the man, they were by no means the only matters of importance 
in his administrations. We shall have occasion later to revert to 

' this period when dealing with the abolition of slavery, the acquisi- 
tion of Texas, and the extension of our settlements into the great 
region beyond the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. The decade 
1 830-1 840 was, in fine, a new era in our history. It was a period 
of epoch-making inventions and discoveries in the industrial world, 
of far-reaching innovations in politics, of ardent social reforms and 
humanitarian projects. 

325. New Inventions and Discoveries. We are accustomed to 
think of battles and treaties as the exciting events which have brought 
the changes in a nation's life — and it is true that some few 'decisive 
battles" have altered the course of history. But the steady, silent 
work of the head and hands of a people engaged in invention and 
industry has done more to shape the course of history than all the 
array of armies with bugle and sword. The invention in 1834 of the 
McCormick reaper was the prophecy that our great wheat and corn 
fields of the West would some day produce enough to feed half the 
world. The utilization of the immense anthracite-coal deposits of 
Pennsylvania in the process of iron smelting in 1836 foreshadowed 
this mighty age of steel which has superseded our fathers' age of 
wood. The appliance of the screw propeller to ocean steamers in 
1839 opened the way for the Leviathan. And, chief of all, the ap- 
pearance in 1830 of a steam locomotive on the new 23-mile track of 
the Baltimore and Ohio Railway gave promise of the network of 
nearly 250,000 miles of railroad track which covers our country 
today, bringing the Pacific coast within five days of New York City. 
It is an interesting coincidence that while the steam locomotive was 
being tested, and its advocates were laboring to overcome the foolish 
prejudices against its adoption/ statesmen in Congress were ridiculing 

1 The locomotive, it was said, would spoil the farms by its soot and ignite barns and 
dwellings by its sparks. Its noise wouid frighten the animals so that hens would not lay 
and cows would refuse to give their milk. 



238 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

the idea of our taking any interest in the Oregon region beyond 
the Rockies, on the ground that it would take a representative from 
that country a year to make the journey to Washington and back. 
326. Effect of the Railroads on Economic Development. By 
the end of the decade the 23 miles of railroad had increased almost 
a hundredfold, and steam trains were running in all the Atlantic 
states from New York to (^eorgia. This improvement in transporta- 
tion over wagon and canal stimulated business in every direction. 
The demand for the products of American farms and factories in- 
creased with the extension of the means of transportation. As the 




A RAILROAD TRAIN OF 1830 COMPARED WITH A MODERN LOCOMOTIVE 



volume of freight traffic grew, cities began to develop rapidly at 
certain distributing or terminal points. Large sums of money were 
concentrated in these cities in business schemes or invested in the 
stocks and bonds of the new railroads. With the gathering of popu- 
lation and capital in the cities, and the enlargement of the small local 
business concerns into joint-stock companies employing hundreds of 
workmen, the conditions of the laboring class and the relations of 
labor to capital began to claim serious attention. 

327. Labor Agitation. In 1833 a Labor party held its first 
national convention at Philadelphia and formulated demands for 
higher wages, shorter hours of work, and more sanitary conditions 
in shops and factories. Trade unions began to be formed — the 
workers banding together both to keep unskilled laborers out of 
the trades and to enforce their demands for higher wages and shorter 
hours of labor. There were strikes in various cities because the 
employers refused the workmen's demands. The laborers also sought 
relief from the state legislatures. Jhey asked to have '^ mechanics' 
lien laws" passed^ giving them a claim upon the buildings which 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 239 

they constructed and thus assuring them of pay for their labor in 
case the contractors failed. They protested against the competition 
of goods made in prisons by convict labor, demanded free schools 
for their children, and denounced the laws which every year sent 
75,000 men to jail for debt.^ 

328. The Democratic Revolution. Besides these social and in- 
dustrial reforms, far-reaching political changes were in progress in 
the decade 1 830-1 840.- It is hardly an exaggeration to say that 
America became a democracy in that decade, which was the first tol 
see all classes of her people participating actively in the government._\ 
In Washington's day only some 120,000 persons in a population 
of 4,000,000 had a right to vote — about one in seven of the adult 
male population. The other six sevenths were excluded from the 
franchise by high property qualifications or religious tests inherited 
from colonial days. As late as the election of 1828 Rhode Island, 
with a population of 97,000, cast only 3575 votes. But in the Jack- 
sonian period the democratic ideal of manhood suffrage was trans- 
forming the political aspect of the whole country. States which 
had not altered their constitutions since their establishment (Ten- 
nessee, Mississippi), or even since colonial days (Rhode Island, 
North Carolina), now undertook extensive revisions. They ex- 
tended the right ©f suffrage, shortened the terms of officers, and 
transferred the choice of many executive officials and judges from 
the governor to the people. 

329. The "Spoils System." This democratic revolution had its 
evil side. Clever political managers, or "bosses," began to build up 
party machines in every state by organizing the great masses of voters 
and using the victory of their party for the strengthening of the 
machine. Appointments to public offices in the gift of the successful 
candidates were made as rewards to the men who had done most to 
win the elections, quite irrespective often of their fitness for the 
offices. Faithful and able officials and clerks of many years' service 
were removed simply to make room for men of the victorious party, 
who were clamoring for their places. This use of government offices, 

1 It is hard to imagine a more stupid form of punishment than sending a man to jail for 
debt, forcing him into idleness for a fault which only diligence and industry can cure. Yet 
this custom prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century. Charles 
Dickens portrays its evil effects in " Little Dorrit." 

2 For the contemporary reforms in England of the poor laws, the penal laws, the factory 
laws, and the labor laws, see Cheyney's " Short History of England," chap. xix. 



240 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

from the cabinet portfolios down to the humblest clerkships, as 
prizes of war to be fought for at the polls v/as vindicated in classic 
language by a New York politician named Marcy, who declared 
that "" to the victor belong the spoils." We have seen how Jackson, 
by his wholesale removals from office, extended the " spoils system " 
to the national government. 

330. The National Nominating Conventions. Another important 
feature of the democratic revolution of the decade 1 830-1 840 was 
the development of the national conventions for nominating the 
candidates of each party for president and vice president and for 
publishing a declaration, or "platform," of the principles of the 
party. In 1831 and 1832 three such conventions were held, all at 
Baltimore. The Antimasons (a small party formed to combat the 
secret order of the Masons)^ were first in the field (September, 
1 831), with William Wirt of Maryland as candidate for president. 
The National Republicans followed in December, nominating Henry 
Clay of Kentucky ; and the Jackson men, now calling themselves 
Democrats,- met in May, 1832, and indorsed the ticket, Jackson 

1 Since the foundation of our government two great parties liave generally been opposed 
to each other (Federalists and Republicans, 1790-1816; Whigs and Democrats, 1834-1S52; 
Republicans and Democrats, 1854 to the present). However, many minor parties (or " third 
parties"), formed on various issues, have appeared in our politics since 1830, but so serried 
have been the party ranks that only twice since the Civil War, namely, in the elections of 
1892 and 1912, have third parties had sufficient strength to carry states and so appear in the 
electoral column. 

2 The political parties are rather difficult to keep clearly distinguished, owing to the 
various uses of the names " Republican " and " Democrat " at different times in our history. 
The following chart will aid the student : 



Date 
1/91-1792 

1793 

18 16 cir, 
1S20 cir. 



1825- 



1830 



1S34 



Federalists vs. 

(for strong national government) 



died out, leaving only the 



Democratic Republicans 
(for strictly limited national govern- 
ment) 
dropped the name Democratic and 
became simply the Republicans. 



Republicans 

(" era of good feeling ") 

who split on the question of " internal improvements," such as national 

aid for the construction of canals and roads, and the charter of the National 

Bank, into two wings : 

National Republicans vs. Democratic Republicans 
the nucleus of a new party which, who dropped the name Republican 
in opposition to Jackson, took and became simply 

the name of 

Whigs vs. (Jacksonian) Democrats 

On the great question of slavery the Whig party went to pieces soon 
after 1850, and the present Republican party was organized. 



Page 



162 



197 



241 



3°7 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



241 



BORN TO COMMAND 




and Van Buren. At first each state had one vote in the selection 
of the candidates, irrespective of the number of delegates it sent to 
the convention ; but soon the plan was adopted, which still prevails, 
of having each state represented by a number of delegates twice as 
large as its representation in Congress.^ All our presidents and vice 
presidents since 1832 have been nominated by national conventions. 
331. The New Whig Party. Jackson had not been in office many 
months before his autocratic con- 
duct made him many public op- 
ponents and private enemies. When 
he issued his famous proclamation 
against the nullifiers in South Caro- 
lina, in December, 1832, the 
Charleston Mercury came out with 
a flamboyant article against him, in 
which it declared : " An infuriated 
administration has been driven to 
the use of brute force. ... If this 
Republic has found a master, let us 
not live his subjects I " Recalling 
the Revolutionary days, when our 
forefathers fought against the ''ty- 
rant King George the Third," it 
recommended that the opponents of 
" King Andrew " adopt the old name 
of Whigs, which in the eighteenth 

century stood for the foes of executive tyranny. As the war on the 
United States Bank and the removal of the government's deposits in 
1833 made the President enemies in the North as well as in the South, 
the anti- Jackson men became sufficiently numerous to form the new 
Whig party. The nucleus of the Whig party was the faithful group of 
National Republicans, led by Henry Clay, with their devotion to a 
high tariff, the National Bank, and internal improvements at the 
cost of the government — the so-called "American System." To 
these were added now the Southerners, whom Jackson had offended 
by his attack on the rights of the states, and people from all sections 

1 The Democrats have always required a two-thirds vote of their convention to nominate 
a candidate, while a simple majority vote has nominated the Republican candidate. 



hINU AM)RK\V TlIK FIRST. 



CARTOON OF THE CAMPAIGN OF 1832 



242 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

of the country who were opposed to his financial policy, his ''per- 
sonal" conduct of the government through a group of favorites, and 
his adoption of the odious spoils system. It was essentially an anti- 
Jackson party. 

332. Election of Van Buren. The Whigs were not quite strong 
enough in 1836 to defeat Jackson's chief henchman and personal 
choice for the presidency, Martin Van Buren of New York. Van 
Buren had been vice president during Jackson's second term, and it 
was a great triumph for the old hero of New Orleans over the Senate, 
which had passed a vote of censure on him, when he saw Van Buren, 
whom the Senate had form.erly rejected as minister to England, sworn 
into the presidency by Chief Justice Taney, whom it had likewise 
formerly refused to confirm as Secretary of the Treasury, 

333. Van Buren's Unpopularity. Van Buren, although he was 
one of the most adroit and able politicians in our history and had 
come into office pledged to ''tread in the footsteps of his illustrious 
predecessor," failed to hold the Democratic party together and to 
lead it to victory in 1840. Both public and private causes conspired 
to his defeat. The financial panic of 1837, which followed Jackson's 
issue of the Specie Circular, came in Van Buren's administration, and 
quite naturally he was blamed for it by the unthinking majority. 
Moreover, Van Buren was an aristocratic New Yorker, a rich widower, 
who, according to campaign orators, lived in solitary splendor at the 
White House, eating off golden plates and drinking costly wines 
from silver coolers. The reputation for such conduct, however exag- 
gerated the details, was little likely to win for Van Buren the 
support which the "unspoiled West" had given to the rough old 
hero, Andrew Jackson. And it is not strange that when the Whigs 
nominated William Henry Harrison of Ohio — like Jackson a fron- 
tiersman and Indian fighter, a hero of the War of 181 2, and a plain, 
rugged, honest man of the people — the West flocked to his ban- 
ner and carried him triumphantly into the presidency in a second 
" democratic revolution." 

334. Why Clay was not Nominated in 1840. The presidential 
campaign of 1840 was most exciting and spectacular. Henry Clay, 
the towering genius of the Whig party, should have been the candi- 
date and confidently expected the nomination. But Clay's very 
prominence was against him. He had been badly beaten in the 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



243 



election of 1832 for his mistake in forcing the Bank charter into 
politics to defeat Jackson. Many old Jackson men, disgusted with 
Van Buren, could be counted on to vote for any other Whig nominee 
than Jackson's lifelong enemy, Clay. And finally the growing anti- 
slavery sentiment of the North made it desirable for the Whigs to op- 
pose to Van Buren (himself an antislavery man from a free state) not 
the slaveholder Henry Clay, but a representative of the free North 
who could also appeal to the frontier enthusiasm of the new West. 







TJie Eagle of lUberPp, 
StranffUmif the Serpent 

or coRBVPTiojy. 




True American. Ticket. 

For PresUUrd. 

WM. HENRY HARRISON. 



CAMPAIGN EMBLEMS, 1840 



335. The Triumph of Harrison. A Democratic paper in Balti- 
more made the sneering comment on the choice of Harrison : " Give 
him a barrel of hard cider and settle $2000 a year on him, and . . . 
he will sit the remainder of his days in his Log Cabin ... by the 
side of his fire studying moral philosophy." The Whigs immediately 
took up the challenge and made the homely virtues and simple tastes 
of the old hero, who had spent his nearly seventy years in the defense 
and service of his country, the chief issue of the campaign. "Yes, 
he has lived long enough in the Log Cabin," they said, "■ and we in- 
tend to give him rent-free after March 4, 1841, the great White House 
at Washington." Hard cider was the beverage on tap at the Whig 
rallies all over the country. The feature of every Whig procession 



244 NATIONAL VERSUS SECTIONAL INTERESTS 

was its Log Cabin, with the latchstring out and the coonskin 
nailed to the door, wheeled along to the uproarious shouts of " Tip- 
pecanoe^ and Tyler too," and ''Van, Van is a used-up man !" The 
Whig ticket swept the country. Harrison got 234 electoral votes to 60 
for Van Buren, The Whigs secured both branches of Congress too. 
with a majority of seven in the Senate and forty-four in the House. 
336. The Close of the Ja^'.ksonian Epoch. Harrison's decisive 
victory marks the end of the ''reign of Andrew Jackson."' The date 
also marks the moment when the different sections of our country 
had become fully conscious of their conflicting interests. Two irrecon- 
cilable forms of civilization had been developing during the 
quarter of a century which followed the War of 181 2. In the North 
the democratic, diversified life of manufacture and commerce was 
attended by rapid growth of population through natural increase 
and immigration from Europe. In the South a more stationary and 
aristocratic civilization was founded on the wealth of the cotton fields, 
which were cultivated by an army of 2,000,000 negro slaves. The 
conflict of these two forms of civilization, with their utterly opposite 
economic needs, their diverging political views of the relative rights 
of the states and the Union, their jealousy of each other's extension 
into the West, and their deepening disagreement as to the moral 
right of one man to hold another man in bondage, began about 1840 
to overshadow all the other questions of the period which we have 
been studying, — the Bank, the tariff, the public lands, and internal 
improvements. Not a national election was held from 1840 to the 
Civil War that did not turn chiefly or wholly on the slavery issue. 
At the close of his term of office Jackson had written to Congress, 
'' Unless agitation on this point [slavery] cease, it will divide the 
Union." And in fact the systems of North and South were becoming 
" too unlike to exist in the same nation." What would the outcome 
be? Should the Union be divided, or should the institution of 
slavery be abolished ? 

References 

Nullification: William MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (American 
Nation Series), chaps, iv-vi; Select Documents of United States History, 1776- 
1861, Nos. 53, 55, 56; F. A. Ogg, The Reign of Andrew Jackson (Chronicles, 
Vol. XX), chaps, vi-viii; D. F. Houston, A Critical Study of Ntdlification in 

1 In reference to Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at Tippecanoe Creek, in iSii (see 
above, p. 192). 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 245 

South Carolina (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. IH) ; J. W. Burgess, The 
Middle Period, chap, x; J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United 
States, Vol. VI, pp. 148-177; H. von Holst, Constitutional History of the 
United States, Vol. I, chap, xii; Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Con- 
troversies of the Nineteenth Century, chap, ix; C. H. Peck, The Jack- 
sonian Epoch, chap, v; J. S. Bassett, Andreiv Jackson, chap. xxvi. 

The War on the Bank: McMaster, Vol. VI, chap, lix; MacDonald, 
Jacksohian Democracy, chaps, vii, xiii; ^clect Documents, Nos. 46, 50, 51, 52, 
54, 57-62 ; WooDROw Wilson, History of the American People, Vol. IV, chap, ii; 
Ralph H. Catterail, The Second Bank of the United States; Burgess, chaps, 
ix, xii; Ogg, chap, ix; D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States, 
chap. ix. ; Bassett, chaps, xxvii, xxviii. 

A New Party: MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, xi, xiv, xvii; S. P. 
Orth, The Boss and the Machine (Chronicles, Vol. XLIII), chaps, i, ii; J. A. 
WooDBURN, Political Parties and Party Problems in the United States, chap, iv ; 
McMaster, Vol. VI, chap. Ixix; Ogg, chap, xi; Stanwood. History of the 
Presidency, chaps, xv, xvi; E. E. Sparks, The Men who made the Nation, chap, 
ix; E. L. Bogart, Industrial History of the United States, chaps, xvi, xvii, xx; 
Peck, chap, xi; biographies of Jackson by W. G. Brown (very brief), William 
G. Sumner (American Statesmen Series), A. C. Buell (2 vols.), and J. S. 
Bassett (2 vols.). 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. Foreign Affairs in Jackson's Administration: J. D. Richardson, 
Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. II, pp. 437 ff. ; Von Holst, Vol. II, 
PP- 553-570; McMaster, Vol. VI, pp. 236-242, 299-303, 421-446; J. W. 
Foster, A Century of American Diplomacy, pp. 273-281; Bassett, pp. 656- 
683; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, pp. 200-218. 

2. The Webster-Hayne Debate: Edward Everett, in North American 
Review, Vol. XXXI, pp. 462-546 ; McMaster, in Century Magazine, 
Vol. LXII, pp. 228-246; MacDonald, Select Documents, Nos. 47-49; 
Alexander Johnston (ed. Woodburn), American Orations, Vol. I, pp. 231-302. 

3. Coercing South Carolina: Bassett, pp. 552-583; T. H. Benton, Thirty 
Years' View, Vol. I, chaps. Ixxx-lxxxvi; E. P. Powell, N idlification and Seces- 
sion in the United States, pp. 262-2S8, and Appendix, pp. 298-324; Mac- 
Donald, Select Documents, No. 56; Houston, pp. 106-133; T. D. Jervey, 
Robert Y. Hayne and his Times, pp. 297-356. 

4. Jackson the Autocrat: A. B. Hart, American History told by Con- 
temporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 158, 160; M.i^cDoNALD, Select Documents, Nos. 64, 
68; Carl R. Fish, The Civil Service and the Patronage, pp. 105-133; Von 
Holst, Vol. II, pp. 1-39; Buell, Vol. II, pp. 383-412; C. A. Davis, Major 
Jack Dowling's Letters (a satire on Jackson) ; Higginson and MacDonald, 
History of the United States, pp. 411-428. 

5. Travel and Transportation in Jackson's Day: Hart, Slavery 
and Abolition (American Nation Series), pp. 33-48; American HiUory told 
by Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 165-168; Josl\h Quincy, Figures of the 
Past, pp. 188-208; McMaster, Vol. VI, pp. 77-95; MacDonald, Jacksonian 
Democracy, pp. 136-147; Bogart, pp. 208-219; Charles Dickens, American 
Notes (ed. of 1842). 



PART V. SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

CHAPTER XI 
THE GATHERING CLOUD 

The Missouri Compromise 

337. Slavery in the Colonies. Up to this point we have men- 
tioned only incidentally and occasionally the institution of negro 
slavery, which led to the greatest crisis in our country's history — 
disunion and civil war. In the year 1619 a Dutch trading vessel 
brought twenty slaves from the West Indies to the Virginia colony 
at Jamestown, and during the century which followed about 25,000 
negroes were landed on our shores to work in the tobacco and rice 
fields of the South or to become household servants in the wealthier 
families of the middle and northern colonies. The eighteenth century, 
however, saw a great increase in the importation of slaves into the 
colonies, when Great Britain, victorious in a long war with France 
and Spain (1702-17 13), demanded as one of the terms of peace 
the monopoly of carrying negroes from the African coast to the New 
World. Reputable business firms, high nobles, even Queen Anne her- 
self and her courtiers, had large sums of money invested in the slave 
trade, from which the dividends sometimes mounted to fortunes. 

338. The Horrors of the Slave Trade. The slave hunters kid- 
naped the negroes in Africa, chained them together in gangs, and 
packed them closely into the stifling holds of their narrow wooden 
ships, to suffer torments on the tropical voyage from the African 
coast to the West Indies. This awful journey was called the " middle 
passage," because it was the second leg of a triangular voyage from 
which the British and colonial captains derived large profits. They 
took rum from the New England distilleries to Africa to debauch 
the innocent natives, whom they seized and brought to the West 
Indies to exchange for sugar and for molasses, which went to New 

England to make more rum. So rum, negroes, and molasses made 

247 



248 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



the endless chain of this disgraceful traffic. The horrors of the 
middle passage moved the colonists at times to pass bills prohibiting 
the slave trade. But the British crown vetoed the bills.^ We must 
remember in all our study and judgment of the problems which the 
presence of the negro in the South has forced upon our country, that 
it was not so much the colonists as the merchant traders and capi- 
talists who were responsible for the slave traffic in the eighteenth 
century ; and that the New England rum distillers were responsible 
for bringing thousands of negroes from Africa to sell as slaves in 

the West Indies. 

339. The Increase 
of Slavery in the 
South. As the dif- 
ferent types of 
colonial industry de- 
veloped, — shipping, 
fishing, farming in 
the North, and the 
cultivation of the 
large tobacco, cot- 
ton, and rice planta- 
tions in the South, — 
it became evident 
that the home of the negro was to be that part of our land whose 
climate fitted his physique and whose labor fitted his intellect. As 
early as 1 7 1 5 the negroes comprised 2 5 per cent of the population of 
the colonies south of the Potomac River, in comparison with 9 per 
cent in the middle colonies and less than 3 per cent in New England. 
South Carolina already had, as she has had ever since, a larger negro 
than white population. Before the close of the eighteenth century 
every state north of Maryland except New Jersey had provided for 
the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery, while Whitney's inven- 
tion of the cotton gin in 1793 had fixed the institution firmly upon the 




WHITNEY S COTTON GIN 



1 One of the charges brought against George III by Thomas Jefferson in the original 
draft of the Declaration of Independence was that he had encouraged the slave trade, 
" violating the most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [the 
Africans] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another 
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." The Friends of 
Germantown, Pennsylvania, protested against the practice of slavery as early as 1688. 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 249 

South. The English colonies in America, therefore, were not a free 
land which was gradually encroached upon by slavery, but a land in 
all of whose extent slavery was at first recognized by law, and only 
later excluded from those portions where it was economically un- 
profitable. 

340. Humanitarian Views of Southern Slave Owners. A small 
number of plantation owners, like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, 
and Randolph, influenced no doubt by the spirit of humanity and 
philanthropy which was abroad in the later years of the eighteenth 
century, had misgivings as to the justice of holding slaves.^ Thomas 
Jefferson, for example, the most pronounced of the antislavery slave- 
holders suggested in his "Notes on Virginia" (1784) that the slaves 
be purchased by the state and sent to form a colony in the West 
Indies. He also, the same year, tried in vain to persuade Congress 
to exclude slavery from all the territory west of the Alleghenies. 
But however much the enlightened men of the South deplored the 
existence of slavery from the point of view of ethics and humanity, 
they found themselves part of an industrial system which seemed to 
demand the negro slave for its very existence. 

341. Slavery recognized by the Constitution. When the Con- 
stitution was framed, therefore, the slaveholding states of the South 
secured recognition of their institution and indulgence for it. Three 
fifths of the slaves were counted in the population in making up 
the census for the House of Representatives, and Congress was for- 
bidden to prohibit the slave trade for twenty years — a period 
sufficiently long to supply the South with enough slaves to insure the 
indefinite continuance of the institution. 

342. Legislation Favorable to Slavery, 1790-1819. A little 
group of antislavery people in the North had from the first been 
dissatisfied with the tolerant attitude of the Constitution toward 
slavery. In Washington's first administration (1790) they began a 
series of petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the 
United States, which were continued for three quarters of a century, 
to the Civil War. Congress returned to the first petition of 1790 

1 Jefferson, in discussing slavery, said, " I tremble for my country when I reflect that God 
is just." Washington wrote to his secretary, Tobias Lear, that he was anxious to " dispose 
of a certain kind of property [negro slaves] as soon as possible." John Randolph (who lib- 
erated his slaves) declared that "all other misfortunes of life were small compared with 
being bom a master of slaves." 




2 50 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

the same answer that it gave to all the later ones ; namely, that 
slavery, being a ^'domestic institution," was subject to the laws of the 
states, not to those of the national government. Even the repeated 
attempts to get Congress to impose a tax of $io a head on imported 
slaves, which was authorized by the Constitution, all failed. On the 
other hand, the favors which slavery received from Congress during 
this period were many. In 1792 Kentucky was admitted to the 
Union with a constitution which sanctioned slavery. In 1793 Con- 
gress passed a fugitive-slave law, allowing a slave owner to reclaim 
a runaway negro in any state in the Union by a mere decision of 

the local judge, without jury trial. 
RUN away on the ^d ^^ j. 5 Congress accepted North 

Day of May isft, a young ' ^ ° '^ 

Negro Boy, named jte, fhu Carolina's cessiou of land west of the 

CouDtfV born, iortnerlr be a n i • • • i. j. 

Jongcd 'o Cape «»gA M,,. Allcghemes, promismg not to pro- 
vv'hoe|rerbfinginheuidfioy ^ibit slavery therein; and imme- 

(be Subfciibcj-at£rf//f» or to ■' ' 

tie Wojtc Houte in Charks ^cuv. ihaii diately Tennessee, which lay within 

have t / rcwaid On thecahfrary who- ,i • x '^ j -ii j 

ever harbour, the faid Boy, may depend ^^is territory, was admitted as a 

opon^tingfeverel/profecured, by slavcholding State. In 1 798 the tcr- 

9f ALTER LUNBAR^ Ter- ritory of Mississippi was organized, 

and only 12 votes were cast in Con- 

ADVERTISEMENT FOR A RUN- , ■' 

AWAY SLAVE S^css lu favor of excluding slavery 

from its borders. In 1803 the im- 
mense territory of Louisiana was purchased from Napoleon under 
terms which protected slavery wherever it already existed in the 
territory. In 1805 Congress, by a vote of 77 to 31, defeated 
a bill to emancipate the slaves in the national domain of the 
District of Columbia. In 18 12 the lower end of the Louisiana 
territory was admitted to the Union as the state of Louisiana, with 
slavery — the third slave state to be admitted since the organiza- 
tion of the government, as against the two free states of Vermont 
(1791) and Ohio (1803). 

343. The Missouri Bill. It is no wonder, in view of such gener- 
ous recognition of the slavery interests, that the Southerners were 
taken by surprise at the serious opposition aroused in Congress when 
the slaveholding territory of Missouri^ applied for admission to 
the Union as a state in the autumn of 1818. The bill for the 

1 When the state of Louisiana was formed in iSii, the name of the Louisiana territory 
above 33° was changed to tlie " territory of Missouri." 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 251 

admission of Missouri was laid before the House of Representatives 
for debate on February 13, 1819. The same day James Tallmadge 
of New York moved as an amendment to the bill, '^That the fur- 
ther introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited 
. . . and that all children born within the said state after admission 
thereof into the Union shall be free at the age of twenty-five years." 
The amendment passed the House by a narrow margin, but was 
promptly and decisively rejected by the Senate (31 to 7) ; and the 
Congressional session of 18 18-18 19 came to an end with Missouri's 
application for statehood still pending. During the summer of 18 19 
excitement over the Missouri question was aroused throughout the 
country. Mass meetings were held in the Northern states condemn- 
ing the extension of slavery and in the Southern states demanding 
the rights of the slave owners under the Constitution. The legisla- 
tures of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and even 
slaveholding Delaware passed resolutions against the admission of 
Missouri to the Union wth slavery. When Congress met in Decem- 
ber, 1 8 19, it was overwhelmed with petitions for and against the 
Tallmadge amendment. 

344. Importance of the Missouri Question. There were several 
important points involved in the admission of Missouri. In the 
first place, there were an equal number of free and slave states 
(eleven each) in the Union at the close of the year 18 19, which 
made an even balance between the two sections in the Senate. Sec- 
ondly, Missouri was to be the first state wholly west of the Missis- 
sippi River created out of territory acquired since the formation of 
the Union, and it was felt that if the first state formed from this 
territory were opened to slavery, a precedent would thereby be 
established for admitting all future states on the same basis. Fur- 
thermore, by the third article of the treaty by which the territory 
was acquired from Napoleon the inhabitants were guaranteed "pro- 
tection of their liberty, property, and religion." Many planters had 
taken their slaves into the Missouri territory, relying on this guaran- 
tee. Could Congress now fairly deprive them of their ''property" 
by emancipating all negroes born in the new state ? 

345. Can Congress impose Restrictions on a State? But the 
most serious question involved touched the power of Congress under 
the Constitution to pass the Tallmadge amendment. Congress had 



2 52 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

the express power to " admit new states to this Union." But did it 
have the right to impose restrictions on new states as a condition 
of admission ? The Tallmadge men argued that the power to admit 
necessarily implied the power to refuse to admit, and hence the power 
to make conditions on which it would admit new states to the Union. 
They cited the case of the admission of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, 
which had been required to frame antislavery constitutions. On the 
other hand, the opponents of the amendment declared that Ohio, 
Indiana, and Illinois might legally have insisted, when they became 
states, on determining for themselves the nature of their "domestic 
institutions," which had been prescribed for them by Congress so 
long as they were a part of the Northwest Territory. For Congress 
to determine on what terms a state should come into the Union, 
they argued, would be to substitute for our federal Union of equal 
states a centralized despotism ; for could not Congress, with such 
power, reduce a state to the most abject position of dependence! 
The " Union " then would be a union between a giant Congress and 
pigmy states, between absolutism and impotence. The states which 
Congress should admit to the Union must have the same powers and 
privileges as the states which originally united to form the Union. 

346. Arguments for the Extension of Slavery. Confident that 
their constitutional arguments for slavery were sound, the Southern 
orators proceeded to show not only that the institution was legal but 
that its extension into the new West was desirable. Granted that 
slavery was a moral evil, would it not be better, they said, to diminish 
the evil by spreading it? Would not the black cloud be lightened 
by diffusion? Since not another negro slave was to be brought to 
America, would not the evils arising from those already here be 
lessened the more widely the slaves were scattered ? 

347. A Compromise Measure passed. Early in the session of 
1819-1820 an event occurred which enabled the proslavery Senate 
and the antislavery House to come to an agreement on the Missouri 
question. The province of Maine, which since 1677 had been a part 
of Massachusetts (see page 42), got the consent of Massachusetts to 
separate from it and apply to Congress for statehood. Accordingly, 
in December, 181 9, Maine, with an antislavery constitution already 
prepared, asked for admission into the Union. By way of com- 
promise, to end the debate, the Senate combined the Maine and 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 



253 



Missouri bills and added to them, in the place of the Tallmadge 
amendment, one by Senator Thomas of Illinois, which prohibited 
slavery in all the Louisiana Purchase territory lying above 36° 
30' north latitude, except the proposed state of Missouri. The 
Maine-Missouri-Thomas compromise bill was then sent to the House. 
In return for the admission of the free state of Maine, and for the 
exclusion of slavery from five sixths of the Louisiana Purchase ter- 
ritory, the House by a vote of 90 to 87 dropped the Tallmadge 




STATUS OF SLAVERY BY THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE 



amendment and, to keep the balance in the Senate, let Missouri 
enter the Union as a slave state. President Monroe signed the 
bills for the admission of Maine and Missouri on the third and sixth 
of March, 1820, after being assured by every member of his cabinet 
except John Quincy Adams that the prohibition of slavery in the 
great Louisiana tract north of 36° 30' applied to the region only so 
long as it was under territorial government.^ 

1 As a matter of fact Missouri, owing to her incorporation of a clause in the new consti- 
tution, prohibiting free negroes from entering the state, was not admitted until August, 
1S21, while Maine, whose constitution was already framed when she applied for statehood, 
was admitted in 1S20. It is important to note here, in view of a later controversy, that Con- 
gress, by this compromise bill, excluded slavery from territory of the L/nited States, and that 
all of the 75 votes in the House from the states south of Pennsylvania were cast in faror 
of the bill. 



2 54 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

348. Significance of the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri 
Compromise was one of the most important measures ever passed 
in our history. First of all, it connected the question of slavery 
with westward expansion and revealed to farsighted men, both North 
and South, the fact that the development of our national domain 
was to be marked by a struggle between freedom and slavery. 
Furthermore, the South saw for the first time, in the Missouri de- 
bates, how determined antislavery sentiment was growing in the 
North and resented the attacks on their institution by Northern 
orators. Then, again, the Missouri debates were an important factor 
in that change from the national to the sectional point of view, on 
the part of Calhoun and other Southern leaders, which we have 
already studied in connection with the tariff agitation (pp. 220 f., 
230 f.). These men saw how dangerous such powers as those which 
the Tallmadge amendment gave to Congress would be to slavery, 
and consequently they grew more insistent on the doctrine of the 
sovereignty of the states. 

349. Slavery as a Moral Issue. Finally, and perhaps most 
significant of all, the Missouri debates emphasized the ethical side 
of the slavery question as it had not been emphasized before. To 
answer the stronger legal argument of their Southern opponents, the 
Northern men appealed to the moral sense of Congress and the coun- 
try at large, insisting that a slave population was an enfeebled popula- 
tion, and that the existence of human bondage in our country was 
an outrage to the sublime principles of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. To meet the moral objections of the North the Southerners 
now began to defend as a blessing to the negro the system which they 
had earlier been inclined to deplore as a necessary evil. Hard feeling 
began to develop between the two sections. The North accused the 
South of the sin of willfully maintaining an inhuman and barbarous 
institution, and the South charged the North with overlooking all 
the social and economic arguments for slavery and only encourag- 
ing discontented negroes to rise and massacre their masters. The 
aged Jefferson wrote of the Missouri Compromise : "This momentous 
question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened me and filled me 
with horror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union." 
The echoes of this alarm bell rang through North and South, growing 
louder and louder each decade, till they drowned all other issues of 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 255 

the century in their clamor, — the Bank, the tariff, pubhc lands, the 
currency, internal improvements, foreign negotiations, and domestic 
expansion. The slavery question invaded our pulpits and pervaded 
our literature. It seized on press and platform. It disturbed our 
industries and commerce. And finally it precipitated the mighty 
strife of the Civil War. 



The Abolitionists 

350. The Rise of Abolitionist Sentiment. In the year in ♦ 
which Missouri was finally admitted to the Union, Benjamin Lundy, 
a New Jersey Quaker, began to publish in Ohio the Genius of Univer- 
sal Emancipation, sl weekly periodical devoted to the cause of the 
abolition of slavery. Lundy was the first American to embrace the 
cause of negro emancipation as a life mission, advocating the estab- 
lishment of colonies of liberated slaves on the island of Haiti. He 
traveled thousands of miles, often on foot, through nearly every state 
of the Union, addressing meetings, appealing to churches and col- 
leges, and forming antislavery societies wherever he went. Previous 
to the bitter Missouri debates the slaveholding states were as promis- 
ing a field for emancipation activity as the free North. Antislavery 
societies existed in Kentucky, Delaware, Tennessee, North Carolina, 
Maryland, and Virginia before a single one was formed in New 
England.^ But the rapid extension of cotton cultivation after the 
second war with England and the feeling aroused by the Missouri 
debates produced a great change in the attitude of the South toward 
slavery. After the- Missouri Compromise was passed, free discussion 
of the evils of slavery began to die out in the South, being branded 
by the political and social leaders as treason to the interests of their 
section of the country. On the other hand, the little group of North- 
ern abolitionists began to redouble their efforts. 

351. William Lloyd Garrison. On a visit to Boston in 1828 
Benjamin Lundy met a young man of twenty-two, named William 
Lloyd Garrison, who was earning a bare living by doing compositor's 

1 For example, the plan to get rid of slavery by purchasing the negroes and establishing 
them in a colony on the African coast was almost exclusively a Southern measure. Between 
1820 and i860 the Colonization Society spent $1,806,000 and colonized but 10,500 negroes, — 
fewer than the increase by births in one month. Obviously, trying to remove the negroes 
from the South by colonization was like trying to bail out the sea with a dipper. 



256 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

work in various printing offices. Garrison was immediately won to 
the cause of abolition and a year later joined Lundy at Baltimore in 
the editorship of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Garrison 
announced in his first article that all slaves were "entitled to im- 
mediate and complete emancipation." This position was too radical 
for Lundy, who, with some regard for the property of the slave- 
holders, advocated a gradual emancipation. So the partnership was 
dissolved and Garrison set up his own press in Boston, from which 
on New Year's Day, 1831, he issued the first number of The Lib- 
erator. He had neither capital nor influence. His office was "an 
obscure hole," which the police had difficulty in finding. He had but 
one man and a negro boy to help him in composition and presswork. 
He himself was editor, typesetter, proofreader, printer, and distrib- 
utor of The Liberator, and the very paper on which the first number 
was printed was bought on credit. 

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 

Toiled o'er his types one poor, unlearned young man. 

The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean, 
Yet there the freedom of a race began.i 

352. Garrison's Antislavery Manifesto. Garrison was of the 
stern, unyielding, undaunted race of the ancient Hebrew prophets. 
He saw, and wished to see, only one truth, namely, that slavery was 
sin. "On this subject," he wrote in his first announcement in The 
Liberator, "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with modera- 
tion. No ! no ! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate 
alarm, , . . tell the mother to gradually extricate the babe from the 
fire into which it has fallen — but urge me not to use moderation in 
a cause like the present. . . . I. will be as harsh as truth and as 
uncompromising as justice. . . . I am in earnest — I will not equivo- 
cate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I 
WILL BE HEARD ! The apathy of the people is enough to make every 
statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the 
dead." 

353. Nat Turner's Insurrection. A horrible massacre, by negroes, 
of over sixty white people (mostly women and children) occurred 
in Southampton County, Virginia, in the late summer of the same 

1 James Russell Lowell's " To William Lloyd Garrison." 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 



257 



year that The Liberator was started. Nat Turner, the slave who led 
the insurrection, was a fanatical lay preacher who could read and 
write. The Southerners laid the dreadful deed to the influence of The 
Liberator and other abolitionist literature that was being sent into the 
slave states. They demanded that the legislatures of the free states 
should silence all antislavery agitation by a strict censorship of the 
press and of the public platform. They increased the severity of their 
own laws in restraint of negroes, both slave and free. In Delaware 
the assembling of more than six negroes was forbidden. In Virginia 
thirty-nine lashes were given a slave who was found with a gun in 
his possession. A law of Tennessee provided that no slave "dying 




FACSIMILE OF THE HEADING OF THE LIBERA TOR 



under moderate correction" (that is, the slave driver's lash) could 
be held by the courts to have been " murdered." A wave of appre- 
hension ran through the South lest the Southampton horror should 
be repeated. 

354. Northern Hostility to the Abolitionists. The majority of 
the business and professional men of the North were scarcely less 
hostile to the abolitionists of the Garrison type than were the slave- 
holders themselves. In fact, Garrison declared that he found "con- 
tempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, 
prejudice more stubborn," in New England than in the South. It 
was not in Charleston or Richmond but in Boston that he was 
dragged through the streets, with a rope around his neck, by a 
"mob of respectable citizens," to be tarred and feathered on the 
Common, and was with difficulty rescued by the police and lodged in 
the city jail for his safety. As a rebuke to the abolitionists the free 
negroes in many cities of the Nortla were treated with contemptuous 



2 58 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

discrimination ; they were ejected from cars and coaches, assigned 
to corners in the churches, and excluded from the schools. Daniel 
Webster assured an anxious Southern correspondent in 1833 that 
"the North entertained no hostile designs toward slavery," and 
Charles Sumner (who twenty-five years later nearly paid with his 
life for his advocacy of free soil) declared that "an omnibus load 
of Boston abolitionists had done more to harm the antislavery cause 
than all its enemies," 

355. Contrast between Antislavery Men and Abolitionists. We 
must distinguish carefully between the antislavery men, like Web- 
ster and Sumner, on the one hand, and the Garrison abolitionists 
on the other. The former recognized that the slavery question was 
exceedingly complicated, involving considerations of property, of 
social rank, of the rights of the states, and of the established in- 
dustrial system of the South, as well as the moral issue. But the 
Garrison abolitionists saw only that slavery was sin, the violation 
of the Christian principle of the brotherhood of man. When therefore 
the moderate emancipators said that slavery was "the calamity of 
the South and not its crime," the abolitionist replied that it was 
a calamity because it was a crime. When the moderates suggested 
that the nation should assume the burden of emancipation by appro- 
priating to it the revenues from the sale of the public lands, the 
abolitionists declared for immediate, unconditional, and uncompen- 
sated emancipation. The antislavery men were willing to proceed 
according to the methods recognized by the Constitution ; that is, 
to confine their demands to emancipation in the District of Colum- 
bia (which was national territory) or to petition for an amendment 
to the Constitution giving Congress the power to abolish slavery in 
the states. But Garrison denounced the Constitution as " a covenant 
with death and an agreement with hell" and burned a copy of it 
publicly to show his horror of its recognition of slavery. He pro- 
claimed as his motto " No union with slaveholders ! " and forbade 
his followers to vote or hold office or even take the oath of allegiance 
to a constitution which supported slavery. 

356. The South makes Abolitionists. As the abolitionists were 
very active in organizing societies in every town and flooding the 
South with literature, while the more moderate antislavery men re- 
frained from speaking their mind for the sake of preserving as much 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 259 

harmony as possible between the two sections of the country, it was 
only natural that the South should believe the extreme abolitionist 
sentiment to be much more widespread in the North than it really 
was. In fact, the abolitionists might have long remained a small 
sect of extremists had not the Southerners themselves driven thou- 
sands into their ranks by trying to muzzle the liberty of petition and 
debate in Congress, thus identifying the cause of slavery with the 
denial of free speech. 

357. The Abolition Controversy enters Congress. The intro- 
duction of abolitionism into Congress marks an important epoch in 
the slavery question. During the early years of Garrison's activity 
(1829-1833) Congress was busy with the agitation over the "Tariff 
of Abominations," the renewal of the Bank charter, the great Web- 
ster-Hayne debates on sectionalism, and the crisis of nullification. 
The slavery issue was kept in the background, being confined to the 
lecture hall and the abolitionist journals. But from the session of 
1 834-1 83 5 on, numerous petitions for the restriction or abolition of 
slavery were presented in both Houses of Congress.^ The attitude 
of the Southern members toward such petitions was shown when Wise 
of Virginia declared in the House (February, 1835) : "Sir, slavery, 
interwoven with our very political existence, is guaranteed by 
our Constitution. You cannot attack the institution of slavery 
without attacking the institutions of our country." And Calhoun in 
the Senate called a mild petition from the Pennsylvania Friends for 
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (1836) "a foul 
slander on nearly one half the states of the Union." 

358. The "Gag Resolution." The first amendment to the Con- 
stitution forbids Congress to make any law abridging "the right 
of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances." 
Up to the days of the abolitionist excitement Congress had respected 
this amendment and received all petitions. But in May, 1836, the 
enemies of abolition, North and South, united in the following reso- 
lution in the House : " That all petitions . . . relating in any way 
to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without 
being either printed or referred [to a committee], be laid upon the 

1 The American Antislavery Society had been organized by the abolitionists at Philadel- 
phia in 1833 and had added 200 branch societies by 1835. Before this epoch only the Friends 
had taken an interest in petitioning Congress for the destruction of slavery. 



26o SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

table, and that no further action shall be had thereon." This 
"gag resolution" furthered the abolitionist cause more than all the 
published numbers of The Liberator. John Quincy Adams, no friend 
of abolition before/ answered, when his name was called on the 
vote, "I hold the resolutibn to be a direct violation of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, of the rules of this House, and of 
the rights of my constituents." The gag resolution passed, however, 
by a vote of 117 to 68 and, in spite of Adams's valiant opposition, 
was renewed in succeeding sessions, and in 1840 was made a "stand- 
ing" or permanent rule of the House.^ 

359. The Slaveholders' Demands. Meanwhile the Senate, al- 
though it did not pass any similar resolution, rejected the abolitionist 
petitions decisively. In the course of the debates the Southern 
members, led by Calhoun, formulated the full demands of the slave 
interests ; namely, that the government should protect slavery in 
the Southern states, that the people of the North should cease to 
attack or even discuss the institution, and that there should be no 
agitation for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or 
the territory of Florida.^ 

360. Attempt to exclude Abolitionist Matter from the Mails. 
Furthermore, the executive department of the government had been 
drawn into the abolitionist struggle. The people of the South ob- 
jected to the distribution of abolitionist literature through their mails. 
One night in the summer of 1835 a number of leading citizens of 
Charleston, South Carolina, broke into the post office, seized a mail 
sack full of abolitionist documents, and publicly burned them. 
Appeal was made to the Postmaster- General, Amos Kendall, himself 
a slaveholder, to refuse the abolitionists the use of the United States 
mails. Kendall declared that he would not compel any postmaster 
to deliver abolitionist mail. A bill was introduced into Congress 
(July 2, 1836), but not passed, punishing with dismissal, fine, and 

1 In 1807 he had voted in the Senate against the law to prohibit the slave trade, and in 
18 14, as peace commissioner at Ghent, he had insisted that the British pay for the slaves 
they had stolen in the United States. 

2 It was not till December, 1844, that Adams, after an eight years' fight, during which 
an attempt was made to censure him publicly, was able to get the gag resolution repealed by 
a vote of 108 to 80. 

3 Arkansas, the only territory of the Louisiana Purchase tract left open to slavery after 
the Missouri Compromise, was admitted as a slave state in 1836. This left Florida the only 
territory in which slavery legally existed. 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 261 

imprisonment any postmaster who intentionally detained mail matter 
from reaching the person to whom it was addressed. 

361. The Abolitionists Victims of Violence. These events of 
the years 183 5-1 83 7 in Congress woke the people of the land to 
realization of the tremendous problem they had on their hands. 
The antislavery men of the North drew closer to the abolitionist 
position when they saw how little chance there was of friendly co- 
operation with the South for the removal of slavery. Deeds of mob 
violence still further inflamed the antislavery spirit. In 1836 the office 
of The Philanthropist, an abolitionist paper published in Cincinnati 
by James G. Birney, a former Alabama planter who had come North 
and been converted to the abolitionist cause, was sacked by a mob, 
and Birney was obliged to flee for his life. The next year Elijah 
Lovejoy, after his printing press had been wrecked three times, was 
deliberately shot by a mob in Alton, Illinois, for insisting on pub- 
lishing an abolitionist paper. 

362. The Liberty Party. Although Garrison and his New Eng- 
land followers condemned any participation in politics under a con- 
stitution which recognized slavery, the more practical abolitionists of 
the Middle and Western border states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois, formed a political party. In 1838 they elected Joshua 
R. Giddings to Congress, and in the presidential campaign of 1840 
they cast over 7000 votes for James G. Birney. We shall see in the 
next chapter what a great influence this Liberty party exercised in 
the decade 1840-1850. In spite of Garrison's opposition to the 
party, it was nevertheless the natural and logical outcome of the 
abolitionist movement and the true foundation of the new Repub- 
lican party which twenty years later triumphed in the election of 
Abraham Lincoln. 

363. The Southern Apology for Slavery. The failure of the 
South to get rid of slavery in the early decades of the nineteenth 
century must be set down to the domination of a class of rich, aris- 
tocratic planters, who found slavery both economically profitable 
and the basis of a social order in which they enjoyed a comfortable 
and commanding position. Their slaves excluded the competition 
of free labor and kept the poorer whites from attaining the indus- 
trial development which would have given them a share in the com- 
mercial wealth and the political power of the South. Calhoun, in a 



262 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

conversation with Horace Binney, a Northern friend, in 1834, boasted 
of the superiority of slave labor over free labor in a democracy. 
Of the Northern laborers he said : " The poor and uneducated 
are increasing. There is no power in representative government 
to suppress them. Their numbers and disorderly tempers will 
make them in the end the enemies of the men of property. They 
have the right to vote, and will finally control your elections, invade 
your houses, and drive you out of doors. . . . They will increase till 
they overturn your institutions. Slavery cuts off this evil at its 
roots. . . . There cannot be a durable republic without slavery." 

364. The Failure of the Moral Argument. The moral argument 
of the abolitionists had^less and less weight as this caste system hard- 
ened. " By what moral suasion," asked an apologist for slavery in 
the South, "do you imagine you can prevail on us to give up a 
thousand millions of dollars in the value of our slaves and a thou- 
sand millions more in the depreciation of our lands ? " Had the 
South been willing, there is little doubt that a plan of gradual eman- 
cipation could have been found. Other nations had got rid of slavery 
without revolution or bloodshed, and the example of England, which 
purchased and set free the slaves in her West Indian colonies in 
1833, was before the eyes of the world. But under the provocation 
of the abolitionists' attacks the legislatures of the Southern states, 
instead of devising plans of emancipation, passed laws to fix the 
status of slavery on the negroes forever. 

References 

The Missouri Compromise: W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the 
African Slave Trade, chaps, i-iii; A. B. Hart, American History told by Con- 
temporaries, Vol. I, Nos. 86, 87; Vol. II, Nos. 42, 102-108; F. J. Turner, Rise 
of the New West (Am. Nation), chap, x; John Quincy Adams, Memoirs, 
Vols. IV, V; J. A. WooDBURN, Historical Significance of the Missouri Com- 
promise, in American History Association Report, 1893, pp. 249-298; J. W. 
Burgess, The Middle Period, chap, iv; J. B. McMaster, History of the People 
of the United States, Vol. IV, chap, xxxix; J. F. Rhodes, History of the United 
States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, pp. 29-39; Carl Schurz, Henry 
Clay, Vol. I, chap. viii. 

The Abolitionists: Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 174-181, 186; 
Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation), chaps, vii-xviii; W. P. and F. J. Gar- 
rison, Life of William Lloyd Garrison ; McMaster, Vol. VI, chap. Ixi ; Higgin- 
soN and MacDonald, History of the United States, chap, xix; Jesse Macy, The 



THE GATHERING CLOUD 263 

Anti-Slavery Crusade (Chronicles, Vol. XXVIII), chaps, ii-v; William Mac- 
Donald, Select Documents of United States History, iyy6-iS6i, Nos. 63-69; 
T. C. Smith, The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in the Northwest, chaps, ii, 
iii; Burgess, chap, xi; Rhodes, Vol. I, pp. 53-75; Booker T. Washington, 
The Story oj the Negro, chap. xiv. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. Antislavery Sentiment in the Eighteenth Century: Henry Wilson, 
The Rise and Fall oj the Slave Power, Vol. I, pp. 1-30; Thomas Jefferson, 
Notes on Virginia; William Birney, James G. Birney, His Life and Times, 
Appendix C; John Woolman, Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes; 
H.art, Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 102, 103, 106; Gaillard Hunt, Life of 
James Madison, pp. 70-76. 

2. Slavery in the Constitution of the United States: Wilson, Vol. I, 
PP- 39-56; DuBois, pp. 53-69; Jonathan Elliot, Debates on the Adoption 
of the Federal Constitution, Vol. V; J. R. Brackett, The Status of Slavery, 
1775-178Q (in J. F. Jameson's Essays in Constitutional History), pp. 263-311; 
H. V. Ames, Slavery and the Constitution. 

3. The "Gag Resolution": J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, Vol. VIII, pp. 434-481; 
Vol. IX, pp. 267-2S6; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, No. 184; C. H. Peck, 
The Jacksonian Epoch, pp. 273-279, 373-392; J. T. Morse, Jr., John Quincy 
Adams, pp. 243-262; Josiah Quincy, Memoir of John Quincy Adams, pp. 251- 
262; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation), pp. 256-275. 

4. Abolitionist Literature in the United States Mail: Hart, Contem- 
poraries, Vol. Ill, No. 180; Slavery and Abolition, pp. 286-288; J. D. Richard- 
son, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. Ill, pp. 175 ff.; Amos Kendall, 
Autobiography, pp. 645 ff. 

5. James G. Birney: Willl-^m Birney, James G. Birney, His Life and 
Times; Samuel J. May, Recollections of the Antislavery Conflict, pp. 203-211; 
Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, No. 177; Wilson, Vol. I (use index). 



CHAPTER XII 
TEXAS 

Westward Expansion 

365. The Freedom of the New World. One of the chief traits 
of the American people has been their restless activity. The settlers 
who came to our shores in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
came in search of an ampler life than they found in the Old World. 
They wanted elbow room. They demanded freedom — freedom from 
religious persecution, social oppression, and commercial restriction. 
For the sake of living untrammeled lives and working out their own 
destinies they accepted the privations and hardships of the New 
World. Their descendants, increased by new thousands of adven- 
turous immigrants, tended constantly westward, making the exten- 
sion of our frontier to the Pacific the most important influence in 
American history. 

366. Waves of Westward Migration. The westward movement 
is characterized by successive waves of migration. The first great 
wave followed the expulsion of the French from North America in 
1763. Through the passes of the Alleghenies, ''the arteries of the 
West," a stream of pioneers led by Boone, Sevier, Robertson, Har- 
rod, and our other early ''empire builders"^ poured into the forest 
lands of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland valleys ; while 
George Rogers Clark, during the American Revolution, won for 
Virginia and the Union the magnificent territory between the Ohio 
and the Great Lakes, extending westward to the Mississippi. A 
second wave of westward migration followed the War of 181 2, filling 
Indiana and Illinois Territories on the north and Mississippi and Mis- 
souri Territories to the south and bringing live new Western states 
(Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri) into the Union 

1 " A roughened race, embrowned in the sun, loving the rude woods and the crack of the 
rifle, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in their track as if by 
accident rather than by design. . . . Settled life and wild Hf e side by side ; civilization frayed 
at the edges ; Europe frontiered ! " Woodrow Wilson, in The Forum, Vol. XIX, p. 544. 

264. 



TEXAS 



265 



in as many years (181 6-182 1). The third and most wonderful era 
of westward expansion (183 5-1 848) carried our boundary across the 
Rockies and the Sierras to the Pacific Ocean. It is this third period 
which we are to study in the present chapter. The chapter is en- 
titled '^ Texas," because the annexation of that great commonwealth 
to the Union, and the disposition of the land that was acquired in 
the war with Mexico which followed the annexation, determined the 
whole policy of our government toward the West during the decade 
1840-1850. 

367. The Opposition of the East. The path of westward ex- 
pansion was never smooth. Besides the dangers of the wilderness, 



„,.«..'@is,„^»ajk.^,„ 



■■"■firfS"-" 














im-Me'-"'^ 



AN EIMIGRANT TRAIN ON THE WAY TO THE WEST 



the pioneer communities had to contend with opposition from the 
older states. Up to the time of the Missouri" Compromise this op- 
position arose from the apprehension of the original states that the 
burden of the defense and the development of the new communities 
would fall upon their shoulders, and from the jealousy of the political 
power which the new communities would wrest from them. When 
the bill to admit Louisiana to the Union was proposed in 181 1 Josiah 
Quincy of Massachusetts declared on the floor of Congress : '^ If 
this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dis- 
solution of the Union. . . . Do you suppose the people of the 
Northern and Atlantic states will, or ought to, look on with patience 
and see representatives and senators from the Red River and the 
Missouri pouring themselves on this floor, managing the concerns 
of a seaboard 1 500 miles, at least, from their residence ? " 



2 66 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

368. Slavery and the West. This narrow and selfish opposition 
of the East to the expansion of the West was broken down by the 
democratic revolution of the third decade of the nineteenth century, 
which put Andrew Jackson into the presidential chair. But a still 
more serious complication arose with the debates over the IVIissouri 
Compromise and the abolitionist agitation. Then the question of 
the growth of the West became connected with the question of the 
extension of slavery. After the bitter struggle of the years 183 5-1 83 7 
in Congress over the antislavery petitions and the use of the United 
States mails for antislavery propaganda, no movement for the ac- 
quisition of new territory or the admission of new states could arise 
without immediately starting the strife between the friends and the 
foes of slavery. Senator Benton of IVIissouri likened the slavery 
question to the plague of frogs sent on the Egyptians. ^^We can see 
nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed," he said, " with- 
out having this pestilence thrust before us." It would be impossible 
to overestimate the importance of this connection between westward 
expansion and slavery. The slavery issue came to a crisis not as a 
struggle between North and South, but as a struggle of North and 
South for the West. The sentiment of expansion, so deeply im- 
planted in the breasts of Northerners and Southerners alike, and the 
glory of carrying the American flag to the Pacific Ocean impelled 
our fathers to take possession of the Western land and trust to future 
compromises to settle the question of freedom or slavery within its 
borders. The history of those compromises we shall trace in a later 
chapter. First we must see how the Western land was won. 

369. Claims to the Oregon Region. It will be remembered that 
the treaty of 1819 with Spain fixed our western boundary as far 
north as the forty-second parallel. We had just concluded (1818) 
a treaty with Great Britain by which we agreed to share with that 
power for ten years the great Oregon region lying beyond the Rocky 
Mountains (between 42° and 54° 40' north latitude). The agreement 
was fair, for both countries had claims on Oregon, based upon ex- 
ploration and settlement. For the Americans, a Boston sea captain 
named Gray had sailed into the mouth of the Columbia River in 
1792; the famous Lewis and Clark expedition had traversed the 
region to the Pacific in 1 804-1 806 ; and John Jacob Astor had estab- 
lished the fur post of Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia in 



TEXAS 267 

181 1. For the English, the Hudson's Bay Company had established 
several trading posts north of the Columbia River, Some of our 
Western statesmen, led by Senator Benton, who realized the impor- 
tance of our. extension to the Pacific, urged a settlement of the Oregon 
question which should give the United States full title to the land at 
least as far north as the forty-ninth parallel (our northern boundary 
east of the Rockies). But public opinion was not yet sufficiently 
aroused to the value of Oregon ; and the agreement of 181 8 was 
renewed, in 1827, for an indefinite period, either party having a right 
to terminate it on a year's notice to the other. 

370. The Settlement of Oregon. In spite of the indifference of 
the government and the people at large, a few enthusiasts labored 
hard during the Jacksonian period to secure settlers for the Oregon 
region. A group of about 50 colonists went out in the summer of 
1832, under Nathaniel Wyeth of Massachusetts, but only 11 reached 
Fort Vancouver. Two years later the ]Methodists sent out Daniel 
and Jason Lee as missionaries to the Flathead Indians in the region, 
and other denominations followed their lead. Dr. Marcus Whitman 
of New York, a missionary sent by the American Board of Missions, 
was a most indefatigable worker for the settlement of Oregon, He 
went out in 1835, came back the next year for helpers, then returned 
to Oregon with his newly married wife and another missionary couple. 
When there was some danger that the Board would discontinue its 
stations in Oregon, Whitman again came East, making the trip of 
nearly 4000 miles alone on horseback, to plead for the maintenance of 
the missions. On his return journey he was of great service to a group 
of several hundred emigrants from the Middle West to the Columbia 
valley. By this time (1843) the settlers in Oregon had increased to 
about 1000. Their presence was henceforth our strongest claim to 
the region. 

371. The Condition of Texas about 1830. While Oregon was 
thus being opened for American settlement, a most exciting incident 
in the great drama of expansion was being enacted on our southern 
borders, in Texas. Two years after the treaty of 18 19 with Spain, 
which fixed our southwestern boundary at the Sabine River, Mexico 
joined the long list of Spanish-American colonies which had 'estab- 
lished their independence of the mother country. The government 
of the new republic of Mexico was very weak, however, especially 



268 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



in the provinces lying at a distance from the capital. Texas formed 
one of these provinces and for several reasons chafed under the con- 
trol of Mexico. In the first place, since the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century Americans^ had been crossing the Sabine into Texas, 
until by 1830 there were nearly 20,000 of them in the province. The 
Americans at first had been welcomed and given large tracts of land 
by the Mexicans, partly in return for the aid they furnished the 
latter in their revolt from Spain. But when the number of Ameri- 
cans increased to the point where they threatened to rule the prov- 
ince, the Mexican president, Bustamante, issued an edict (1830) 







.* - 









'^S^^^. 




CONVENT AND GROUNDS OF THE ALAMO 



forbidding all further immigration from the United States into 
Texas.^ Furthermore, the Mexican government had subjected Texas, 
with its predominating Protestant population and its democratic 
ideals imported from America, to the Roman Catholic Spanish offi- 
cials of the smaller province of Coahuila. When Texas petitioned 

1 The term " American," of course, in its literal sense means an inhabitant or citizen of 
America — North, South, or Central But, as we have no single word to denote an inhabitant 
or citizen of the United States, we quite commonly use the term " American " for that pur- 
pose, calling the other " Americans " Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, etc. 

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, our most distinguished foreign critic in the first half of the 
nineteenth century, wrote shortly after 1S30 : " In the course of the last few years, the Anglo- 
Americans have penetrated into this province [Texas], which is still thinly peopled. They 
purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original popu- 
lation. It may be easily foreseen that if Mexico takes no step to check this change, the 
province of Texas will soon cease to belong to her" (Democracy in America, Vol. I, p. 44S). 
In a hundred years Spain had brought less than 3000 white colonists to Texas, while in the 
single decade 1817-1827 about 12,000 Americans crossed the borders into the province. 



TEXAS 



269 



for a separation from Coahuila the Mexican government sent troops 
into the province to maintain order and dispatched a warship to 
patrol the Texan coast. 

372. Texas wins its Independence. Incensed by this treatment 
and encouraged by their American neighbors across the Sabine, the 
Texans, on the second of March, 1836, declared their independence 
and drove the Mexican troops across their border. Santa Anna, the 
new Mexican president, a man of perfidious and cruel character, led 
an army in person to punish the 
rebellious province. His march was 
marked with horrible atrocities. At 
the Alamo, a mission building in 
San Antonio, a garrison of 166 
Texans was absolutely exterminated, 
even to the sick in the hospital 
ward ; and a little further on, at 
Goliad, the defenders were massa- 
cred in cold blood after their sur- 
render. Santa Anna with some 1500 
troops was met at the San Jacinto 
River (April 21, 1836) by a force 
of about 750 Texan volunteers 
under General Sam Houston, a vet- 
eran of the War of 181 2 and an 
ex-governor of Tennessee. The 
Mexican army was utterly routed 

and Santa Anna himself fell into Houston's hands as a prisoner of 
war. The independence of Texas was won. A republic was set up 
with Houston as president, and a constitution was adopted patterned 
after those of the American commonwealths. Slavery was legitimized 
in the new republic, but the importation of slaves from any place 
except the United States was forbidden. Some 50,000 out of the 
68,000 inhabitants of Texas were Americans, and the sentiment of 
President Houston, the legislature, and the people at large was 
overwhelmingly in favor of annexation to the United States. 

373. The Question of the Annexation of Texas. The adminis- 
tration at Washington was also in favor of the annexation of Texas, 
and had been ever since Mexico had secured its independence from 




SAM HOUSTON, PRESIDENT OF 
THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS 



2 70 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

Spain. In 1827 President John Quincy Adams had offered Mexico 
$1,000,000 for Texas; and President Jackson had twice tried to 
purchase the province (1829, 1835), raising Adams's offer to 
$5,000,000. Nevertheless, Jackson refused to conclude a treaty of 
annexation with Texas against the will of Mexico, even after both 
Houses of Congress had recognized the independence of the province 
by large majorities. We were at peace with Mexico, even if on bad 
terms with her on account of claims for damages to American prop- 
erty in Texas and to American commerce in the Gulf. Mexico still 
claimed Texas as a dependency. The revolt was still too recent to 
make the Texan republic an assured fact. Under these circumstances, 
for the United States to take Texas without the consent of Mexico 
would have been a breach of the law of nations and would probably 
have brought on war between the two countries. Moreover, it was a 
most inauspicious moment for the attempt to add the immense slave 
area of Texas to the Union. The abolitionist struggle in Congress was 
at its height. Jackson's successor, Van Buren, was a New Yorker and 
had little desire for extending the domain of slavery. He refused 
to consider any proposition for the annexation of Texas and even 
came to an agreement with Mexico (which that country soon 
broke) for the settlement of the American claims. So the whole 
matter slumbered through Van Buren's administration and played 
no part at all in the turbulent election of 1840, in which the new 
Whig party overthrew the Jackson machine. 

* The 'preoccupation" of Oregon and the 
'^ Reannexation " of Texas 

374. President Tyler and the Whigs. The triumph of the Whigs 
in 1840 was short-lived. President Harrison, the old hero of Tippe- 
canoe, died a month after his inauguration, and Vice President Tyler 
succeeded to his place. Tyler was a Virginian and a Democrat. He 
had been put on the Whig ticket with Harrison in order to win votes 
in the South. The only bond of union between him and men like 
Adams, Clay, Harrison, and Webster was his enmity for Andrew 
Jackson, which had been strong enough to drive him into the 
Whig party. On the great questions of public policy, such as a 
strong central government, internal improvements, the tariff, and 



TEXAS 271 

the Bank of the United States, he was opposed to the Whig leaders. 
When, therefore, Tyler vetoed a bill passed by the Whig Congress 
in 1 84 1 for the recharter of the National Bank, he was "read out" 
of the Whig party, and every member of his cabinet resigned except 
Daniel Webster. 

375. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Webster retained his 
office of Secretary of State because of an important diplomatic 
negotiation with England. Ever since the treaty of peace of 1783 
the extreme northeastern boundary of the United States (between 
Maine and New Brunswick) had been unsettled, due to a disagree- 
ment over the exact location and meaning of "the Highlands," or 
watershed, which divided the St. Lawrence valley from the Atlantic 
coast. British and American lumbermen quarreled over the disputed 
region. In the late thirties the authorities of New Brunswick and 
Maine were at the point of war. An exchange of correspondence 
on the subject between Washington and London resulted in Lord 
Ashburton's being sent over here in the summer of 1842 to arrange 
a settlement. Ashburton was a friend of Webster's, and the negotia- 
tions between them, proceeded with all the courtesy and smoothness 
possible. The Webster-Ashburton treaty was concluded in August, 
1842, dividing the disputed territory almost equally between the 
claimants. 

376. Plan for the Annexation of Texas revived. The next 
spring Daniel Webster retired from the cabinet and was replaced by 
Upshur of Virginia. Webster was a strong antislavery Whig, who had 
put himself on record against the acquisition of Texas in a speech 
made in New York City, on his way home from the congressional ses- 
sion of 1836-1837. "Texas is likely to be a slaveholding country," 
he said, " and I frankly avow my entire unwillingness to do anything 
that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or 
add other slaveholding states to the Union." Upshur, on the other 
hand, was an ardent advocate of the annexation of Texas. With the 
cabinet thus reorganized, and all the men of Harrison's choice re- 
placed by men of Tyler's views, the project for annexation was 
revived. 

377. Tlie Annexationists demand Both Oregon and Texas. It 
was just at this time that popular interest in the distant region of 
Oregon was aroused. This interest furnished the annexationists with 



2 72 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

fine political capital. By combining the demand for Oregon with 
the demand for Texas they could appeal to the people of the United 
States on a platform which emphasized the expansion of American 
territory rather than the extension of the area of slavery. With 
Oregon they might win the Northern expansionists who were op- 
posed to annexing Texas on account of slavery. Thus Oregon was 
used as a makeweight for Texas. 

378. Growth of the Expansionist Sentiment. As the year 1843 
passed, the policy of both Great Britain and Mexico strengthened 
the expansionist sentiment in the United States. The British minis- 
try rejected the offer of our government to divide Oregon by run- 
ning the boundary line of 49° north latitude to the Pacific ; and 
Mexico, besides breaking the agreement made with Van Buren for 
the adjustment of American claims, notified our State Department 
that any move to annex Texas would be regarded as an act of war. 
Moreover, there were fears that Great Britain was using her influence 
to keep us out of Texas. Mexico owed about $50,000,000 to British 
capitalists, for which her lands to the north and west of the Rio 
Grande were mortgaged. An independent state of Texas under 
British protection would furnish England plentiful supplies of cotton, 
and a market for her manufactures unhampered by the tariff of the 
United States. Our minister to Paris wrote home in 1845, "There 
is scarcely any sacrifice England would not make to prevent Texas 
from coming into our possession." 

379. Calhoun's Treaty of Annexation rejected. Calhoun, who 
had succeeded Upshur in the State Department, concluded a 
treaty for the annexation of Texas in April, 1844. But the Senate 
refused by a large majority to ratify it. Besides the antislavery men 
of the North, many Southerners voted against the treaty for various 
reasons : because our charge in Texas had promised that men and 
ships would be sent to protect Texas from Mexican interference while 
the treaty was under discussion ; because they saw in the treaty a 
bid on Calhoun's part for the presidency ; because they thought 
that Calhoun deliberately misrepresented Great Britain's attitude 
in order to hasten annexation ; because they knew that many 
speculators in Texan lands were trying to influence senators in the 
lobbies of Congress to vote for the treaty ; because they were not 
ready to invite war with Mexico ; because they doubted that the 



TEXAS 



273 



Constitution gave power to the president and Senate to annex an 
independent foreign state to our Union by treaty, 

380. The National Conventions of 1844. While Calhoun's treaty 
was being discussed in the Senate, the Whig and Democratic con- 
ventions met to select their candidates for the presidential campaign. 
The Whigs unanimously nominated Henry Clay. On the subject 
of expansion their platform was silent. They relied entirely on the 
record and the popularity of their candidate. In the Democratic 
convention the friends of annexation carried the day after a hard 
battle. Van Buren was rejected, and James K. Polk of Tennessee 
was nominated on the ninth ballot. Polk was an ardent annexationist. 
He had been a member of Congress from 1825 to 1839 and Speaker 
of the House during the stormy days of the abolitionist debates. 
From 1839 to 1841 he served as governor of Tennessee. Although 
by no means an obscure man, Polk had not been regarded as a presi- 
dential possibility before the convention met. He is the first example 
of the ''dark horse "^ in the national convention; and it is a 
significant fact that from this time to the choice of Abraham Lincoln 
in i860, the men of first rank (like Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and 
Douglas) were passed over for more ''available" (compromise) 
candidates. It is the most striking proof of the influence of the 
slavery question in our politics; for no other issue since the estab- 
lishment of our government had been strong enough to keep from 
the highest offices the statesmen of conspicuous genius. 

381. Polk defeats Clay at the Polls. The Democrats went into 
the campaign of 1844 with a frank appeal to the expansionist senti- 
ment of the country. Their platform was the re-occupation of Oregon 
and the re-annexation of Texas. The prefix re in this confident decla- 
ration implied that Oregon was already ours by discovery, settle- 
ment, and treaty ; and that Texas had been really purchased with 
Louisiana in 1803 but had been weakly surrendered to Spain in the 
treaty of 1819. Clay tried to "straddle" the issue of annexation, 
publishing opinions both for it and against it, and concluding in the 
end that "the subject of slavery ought not to affect the question 
one way or the other." Disgusted with Clay's instability, enough 

1 A term borrowed from the language of the race track to denote a horse of whose quali- 
ties and speed nothing is known ; then used in politics of an obscure candidate who " comes 
up from behind " and wins the race. 



2 74 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

Whigs in New York and Michigan cast their votes for the abolitionist 
James G. Birney, the candidate of the Liberty party, to give those 
two states, and therewith the election, to Polk. 

382. The Annexation of Texas. Tyler interpreted the election 
of Polk as the indorsement by the American people of the policy 
of the immediate annexation of Texas. He therefore suggested to 
Congress that it might admit Texas under the clause of the Constitu- 
tion which gives it the right to " admit new states into this Union." 
In February, 1845, both branches of Congress passed a resolution 
in favor of annexing Texas, the House by a vote of 132 to 76, the 
Senate by the close vote of 27 to 25. President Tyler signed the 
resolution on the first of March, three days before his retirement 
from office. The people of Texas welcomed the resolution of Con- 
gress with a rejoicing almost as tumultuous as that which had greeted 
the news of the victory of San Jacinto. Late in the year 1845 the 
republic of Texas became a state of the Union on generous terms. 
She left to the United States government the adjustment of her 
boundaries with Mexico ; handed over to the United States her ports 
and harbors as well as her fortifications, arsenals, and public build- 
ings, keeping, however, her public lands and her debt ; and agreed 
to the prohibition of slavery in that part of the state north of the 
Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30'. With her consent four addi- 
tional states might be made out of her territory. 

383. Settlement of the Oregon Boundary. Texas being safely 
in the Union, the new President began to redeem his campaign pledge 
for the " reoccupation " of Oregon. In his first message to Congress 
(December, 1845) he asserted the claims of the United States to 
the whole of the Oregon region from the Spanish-Mexican boundary 
on the south (42°) to the Russian boundary on the north (54° 40'). 
Great Britain must retire from the whole of Oregon, back to the 
Hudson Bay territory. " Fifty-four forty or fight " was the popular 
war cry in which the victorious Democrats voiced their preposterous 
claims to the whole of Oregon. However, as Mexico began to make 
preparations for carrying out her threats of war, the administration at 
Washington grew more moderate in its claims to Oregon. Neither 
Polk nor Congress had any intention, at such a crisis, of going to 
war with England over a difference of five degrees of latitude on 
our northwestern boundary. So, after a rather amusing campaign 



TEXAS 275 

of correspondence, in which the President and the Senate each tried 
to throw on the other the responsibility of deserting the blustering 
platform of " Fifty-four forty or fight," a treaty was made with 
Great Britain (June, 1846) continuing the parallel of 49°, from 
the Rockies to the Pacific, as the northern boundary of the United 
States. 

The Mexican War 

384. Mexico refuses to recognize the Annexation of Texas. 

The annexation of Texas was a perfectly fair transaction. For nine 
years, since the victory of San Jacinto in 1836, Texas had been an 
independent republic, whose reconquest Mexico had not the slightest 
chance of effecting. In fact, at the very moment of annexation, the 
Mexican government, at the suggestion of England, had agreed to 
recognize the independence of Texas, on condition that the re- 
public should not join itself to the United States. We were not 
taking Mexican territory, then, in annexing Texas. The new state 
had come into the Union claiming the Rio Grande as her southern 
and western boundary. By the terms of annexation all boundary 
disputes with Mexico were referred by Texas to the government of 
the United States. President Polk sent John Slidell of Louisiana 
to Mexico in the autumn of 1845 to adjust any differences over the 
Texan claims. But though Slidell labored for months to get a 
hearing, two successive presidents of revolution-torn Mexico re- 
fused to recognize him, and he was dismissed from the country in 
August, 1846. 

385. Taylor attacked on the Rio Grande. The massing of Mexi- 
can troops 6n the southern bank of the Rio Grande, coupled with the 
refusal of the Mexican government to receive Slidell, led President 
Polk to order General Zachary Taylor to move to the borders. Tay- 
lor marched to the Rio Grande and fortified a position on the northern 
bank. The Mexican and the American troops were thus facing each 
other across the river. When Taylor refused to retreat to the Nueces, 
the Mexican commander crossed the Rio Grande, ambushed a scout- 
ing force of 63 Americans, and killed or wounded 16 of them 
(April 24, 1846). 

386. The United States accepts War with Mexico. When the 
news of this attack reached Washington early in May, Polk sent 



276 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



a special message to Congress, concluding with these words: "We 
have tried every effort at reconciliation. . . . But now, after reiter- 
ated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States 
[the Rio Grande], has invaded our territory and shed American 
blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities 
have commenced, and that the two nations are ^t war. As war exists, 

and, notwithstanding all 
our efforts to avoid it, 
exists by the act of 
]\Iexico herself, we are 
called upon by every 
consideration of duty 
and patriotism to vindi- 
cate with decision the 
honor, the rights, and 
the interests of our 
country." The House 
and the Senate, by very 
large majorities (174 to 
14, and 40 to 2), voted 
50,000 men and $10,- 
000,000 for the prose- 
cution of the war. 

387. Taylor invades 
Mexico. Meanwhile, 
General Taylor had 
driven the Mexicans 
back to the south bank 
of the Rio Grande in the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. 
Six days after the vote of Congress sanctioning the war, he crossed 
the Rio Grande and occupied the Mexican frontier town of Mata- 
moros, whence he proceeded during the summer and autumn of 1846 
to capture the capitals of three of the Mexican provinces, 

388. The Occupation of California and New Mexico. As soon 
as hostilities began. Commodore Sloat, in command of our squadron 
in the Pacific, was ordered to seize California, and General Kearny 
was sent to invade New Mexico, The occupation of California was 
practically undisputed. Mexico had only the faintest shadow of 




THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE MEXICAN WAR 



TEXAS 277 

authority in the province, and the 6000 white inhabitants made no 
objection to seeing the flag of the United States raised over their 
forts. Kearny started with 1800 men from Fort Leavenworth, 
Kansas, in June, and on the eighteenth of August defeated the force 
of 4000 Mexicans and Indians which disputed his occupation of 
Santa Fe. After garrisoning this important post he detached Colonel 
Doniphan with 850 men to march through the northern provinces 
of Mexico and effect a juncture with General Taylor at Monterey, 
while he himself with only 100 men continued his long journey of 
1500 miles to San Diego, California, where he joined Sloat's suc- 
cessor, Stockton. 

389. Taylor's Victory at Buena Vista. After these decided vic- 
tories and uninterrupted marches of Taylor, Kearny, Sloat, Stockton, 
and Doniphan, the Mexican government was offered a fair chance 
to treat for peace, which it refused. Then President Polk decided, 
with the unanimous consent of his cabinet, to strike at the heart of 
Mexico. General Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 181 2, was put 
in command of an army of about 12,000 men, to land at Vera 
Cruz and fight his v/ay up the mountains to the capital city of 
Mexico. Santa Anna, who, by the rapid shift of revolutions, was 
again dictator in Mexico, heard of this plan to attack the capital 
and hastened north with 20,000 troops to surprise and destroy 
Taylor's army before Scott should have time to take Vera Cruz. But 
Taylor, with an army one fourth the size of Santa Anna's, drove the 
Mexicans back in the hotly contested battle of Buena Vista (Feb- 
ruary 23, 1847), securing the Californian and New Mexican con- 
quests. Santa Anna hastened southward to the defense of the city 
of Mexico, 

390. Scott takes the city of Mexico. Scott took Vera Cruz in 
March and worked his way slowly but surely, against forces always 
superior to his own, up to the very gates of Mexico (August, 1847). 
Here he paused, by the President's orders, to allow the Mexicans 
another chance to accept the terms of peace which the United States 
offered, — the cession by ]\Iexico of New INIexico and California 
in return for a large payment of money. The Mexican commis- 
sioners, however, insisted on having both banks of the Rio Grande 
and all of California up to the neighborhood of San Francisco, be- 
sides receiving damages for injuries inflicted by the American troops 



278 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



in their invasions. These claims were preposterous, coming from 
a conquered country, and there was nothing left for Scott to do 
but to resume military operations. Santa Anna defended the 
capital with a force of 30,000 men, but the Mexicans were no match 
for the American soldiers. Scott stormed the fortified hill of 
Chapultepec and advanced to the gates of the city. On the thir- 
teenth of September his troops entered the Mexican capital and 
raised the Stars and Stripes over ''the palace of the Montezumas." 




WIN FIELD SCOTT ZACHARY TAYLOR 

The heroes of the Mexican War 

391. Polk's Efforts to secure Peace. From the beginning of the 
war Polk had been negotiating for peace. He had kept Slidell in 
Mexico long after the opening of hostilities and had sent Nicholas 
Trist as special peace commissioner to join Scott's army at Vera 
Cruz and to offer Mexico terms of peace at the earliest possible 
moment. He had allowed Santa Anna to return to Mexico from his 
exile in Cuba in the summer of 1846, because that wily and treach- 
erous dictator held out false promises of effecting a reconciliation 
between Mexico and the United States. He had asked Congress for 
an appropriation of $2,000,000 for peace negotiations when General 
Taylor was still near the Rio Grande, ten days before General Kearny 



TEXAS 279 

had taken Santa Fe and the province of New Mexico, and before 
General Scott's campaign had been thought of. 

392. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. When the Mexican 
commissioners made advances for peace at the beginning of the year 
1848, they were given terms almost as liberal as those offered them 
before Scott had stormed and occupied their capital. By the treaty 
concluded at Guadalupe-Hidalgo, February 2, 1848, Mexico was 
required to cede California and New Mexico to the United States 
and to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern and western bound- 
ary of Texas. In return, the United States paid Mexico $15,000,000 
cash and assumed some $3,250,000 more in claims of American citi- 
zens on the Mexican government. Considering the facts that Cali- 
fornia was scarcely under Mexican control at all and might have 
been taken at am^ moment by Great Britain, France, or Russia; 
that New Mexico was still the almost undisturbed home of Indian 
tribes; that the land from the Nueces to the Rio Grande was almost 
a desert; and that the American troops were in possession of the 
Mexican capital, the terms offered Mexico were very generous. Polk 
was urged by many to annex the whole country of Mexico to the 
United States, but he refused to consider such a proposal. 

393. The Justice of the Mexican War. The Mexican War has 
generally been condemned by American historians as ''the foulest 
blot on our national honor," a war forced upon Mexico by slave- 
holders greedy, for new territory, a perfect illustration of La Fon- 
taine's fable of the wolf picking a quarrel with the lamb solely for 
an excuse to devour him. But Mexico had insulted our flag, plun- 
dered our commerce, imprisoned our citizens, lied to our representa- 
tives, and spurned our envoys. As early as 1837 President Jackson 
said that Mexico's offenses "would justify in the eyes of all nations 
immediate war." To be sure we were a strong nation and Mexico 
a weak one. But weakness should not give immunity to continued 
and open insolence.- We had a right to annex Texas after that 
republic had maintained its independence for nine years ; yet JSIexico 
made annexation a cause of war. We were willing to discuss the 
boundaries of Texas with Mexico ; but our accredited envoy was 
rejected by two successive Mexican presidents, who were afraid to 
oppose the war spirit of their country. We even refrained from 
taking Texas into the Union until Great Britain had interfered so far 



28o SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

as to persuade Mexico to recognize the independence of Texas if she 
would refuse to join the United States. 

394. The Moral Aspect of the Annexation of Texas. If there 
was anything disgraceful in the expansionist program of the decade 
1840-1850, it was not the Mexican War, but the annexation of Texas. 
The position of the abolitionists on this question was clear and logical. 
They condemned the annexation of Texas as a wicked extension of 
the slavery area, notwithstanding all arguments about "fulfilling our 
manifest destiny" or ''attaining our natural boundaries." To annex 
Texas might be legally right, they said, but it was morally wrong. 
James Russell Lowell, in his magnificent poem " The Present Crisis " 
(1844), warned the annexationists that ''They enslave their chil- 
dren's children who make compromise with sin." We certainly 
assumed a great moral responsibility when we annexed Texas. 
However, it was not to Mexico that we were answerable, but to 
the enlightened conscience of the nation. 

395. Completion of the Program of Expansion. With our ac- 
quisition of the Oregon territory to the forty-ninth parallel by the 
treaty of 1846 with Great Britain, and the cession of California and 
New Mexico by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, the bound- 
aries of the United States reached practically their present limits.^ 
The work of westward extension was done. Expansion, the watch- 
word of the decade 1840-1850, was dropped from our vocabulary for 
fifty years, and the immense energies of the nation were directed 
toward finding a plan on which the new territory could be organized 
in harmony with the conflicting interests of the free and slave sec- 
tions of our country. 

References 

Westward Expansion: G. P. Garrison, Westward Extension (American 
Nation Series), chaps, i, ii, vi, vii; F. J. Turner, Rise of the New West (Am. 
Nation), chaps, v-viii; E. E. Sparks, The Expansion of the American People, 
chap. XXV ; Ellen Semple, American History and its Geographical Conditions, 
chaps, x-xii; Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail, chaps. xLx-xxi; W. E. Dodd, 
Expansion and Conflict (Riverside History, Vol. HI), chap, vii; J. W. Burgess, 
The Middle Period, chaps, xiii, xiv; J. B. McMaster, History of the People 

1 A small strip south of the Gila River (southern Arizona) was bought from Mexico, 
through Mr. Gadsden, in 1853, for $10,000,000. The large sum paid for the Gadsden Pur- 
chase has been called by the critics of the Mexican War " conscience money " paid to Mexico 
for the provinces of which we " robbed " her. 



TEXAS 281 

of the United States, Vol. V, chap, liii ; Vol. VI, chap. Ix ; J. F. Rhodes, History 
of the United States since the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, pp. 75-85 ; Garri- 
son, The First Stage of the Movement for the Annexation of Texas {American 
Historical Review, Vol. X, pp. 72-96). 

The "Reoccupation" of Oregon and the "Reannexation" of Texas: 
Sparks, chaps, .xxv-xxvii; Burgess, chap, xv; L. G. Tyler, Letters and Timei 
of the Tylers, Vol. II, chaps. Lx-xii, xv; William MacDonald, Select Docu- 
ments of United States History, 1J76-1861, No. 71; Justin H. Smith, The 
Annexation of Texas; A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, 
Vol. Ill, Nos. 185-189; H. VON HoLST, John C. Calhoun, chap, viii; Horace 
Greeley, The American Conflict, Vol. I, chap, xii; Garrison, Texas, chaps, 
x-xx; Westward Extension, chaps, viii-xi; J. W. Foster, A Century of American 
Diplomacy, chap. viii. 

The Mexican War: Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 8-14; MacDonald, Nos. 72-74, 
76; Burgess, chap, xvi; Dodd, chap, viii; Rhodes, Vol. I, pp. 86-98; Greeley, 
Vol. I, chap, xiv; Von Holst, chap. Lx; Garrison, Westward Extension, 
chaps, xiii-xv; Texas, chaps, xxi-xxii; James Schouler, History of the 
United States, Vol. V, chap, xviii; President Polk's Administration (Atlantic 
Monthly, Vol. LXXVI, pp. 371-380); Polk's Diary, ed. M. M. Quale; U. S. 
Grant, Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, chaps, iii-xiii; Charles H. Owen, The Jus- 
tice of the Mexican War; E. G. Bourne, The United States and Mexico, 1847- 
1S48 {American Historical Review, Vol. V, pp. 491-502) ; J. S. Reeves, The 
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo {American Historical Review, Vol. X, pp. 309- 
324). 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Legend of Marcus Whitman: Bol^rne, The Legend of Marcus 
Whitman {American Historical Review, Vol. VI, pp. 276-300) ; William 
Barrows Oregon, pp. 160-254; Schouler, Vol. IV, pp. 504-514. 

2. American Pioneers in Texas: H..Addington Bruce, The Romance oj 
American Expansion, pp. 78-105; Garrison, Texas, pp. 137-169; Hart, Vol. Ill, 
No. 185; McMaster, Vol. VI, pp. 251-266; Henry Bruce, Samuel Houston, 
pp. 64-156; Sar.\h B. Elliott, Samuel Houston, pp. 31-72. 

3. The Conquest of California: Sparks, pp. 324-335; Joslah Royce, 
California, pp. 48-150; Garrison, Westward Extension, pp. 230-243; John 
Bidwell, Fremont and the Conquest of California {The Century, Vol. XIX, 
pp. 518-525). 

4. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty: MacDonald, No. 70 (for te.xt) ; 
G. T. Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, Vol. II, pp. 94-io7, 130-172; H. C. 
Lodge, Daniel Webster, pp. 241-263; Tyler, Vol. II, pp. 216-243; T. H. 
Benton, Thirty Years' Vieiv, Vol. II, pp. 420-452; Schouler, Vol. IV, pp. 
403-406; Jared Sparks, The Webster-Ashburton Treaty {The North American 
Revieiv, Vol. LVI, pp. 452 ff.) ; Foster, pp. 281-286. 

5. Henry Clay's Letters of 1844 on the Admission of Texas: Hart, 
Vol. Ill, No. 187; Carl Schltrz, Henry Clay, Vol. II, pp. 242-268; Gar- 
rison, Westivard Extension, pp. 135-140; Edw-^rd Stanwood. History of the 
Presidency, pp. 209-225, 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 283 

397. The Wilmot Proviso. Even before the Mexican War was 
over, it was evident that the United States would demand the cession 
of California and New Mexico in its terms of peace. It was evident 
also that the great question in the acquisition and organization of 
the new territory would be the status of slavery in it. On the very 
day the bill asking for an appropriation to meet the expenses of the 
peace negotiations was introduced into the House, David Wilmot 
of Pennsylvania offered an amendment providing that "neither 
slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . should ever exist in any 
part" of any territory acquired from the republic of Mexico. The 
Wilmot Proviso was carried in the House, but defeated in the Senate, 
where, since the admission of Florida and Texas in 1845, the slave 
states were in the majority. However, the Wilmot Proviso was not 
dropped. It was passed again and again by the House and was 
before the country as the official demand of the antislavery men 
in the organization of the new territory. 

398. The Organization of Oregon. The Oregon region was 
naturally the first to be organized, being acquired nearly two years 
before the Mexican lands. As there was no chance for the culti- 
vation of cotton, sugar, or rice in this region, the controversy over 
slavery need not have entered into the Oregon bill at all. But the 
radical leaders of the South were not willing to let Wilmot's chal- 
lenge go unanswered. So Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a disciple 
of Calhoun and destined in a few years to become his successor as 
the champion of the interests of the slave states, introduced an 
amendment into the Oregon bill to the effect that ''nothing should 
authorize the prohibition of slavery in Oregon so long as it was 
a territory of the United States." Davis's amendment, like Wilmot's, 
was defeated, and Oregon was organized as a territory without slavery 
in August, 1848. But the significant thing in the debates of 1846- 
1848 was that both the antislavery and the proslavery leaders were 
dissatisfied with the Missouri Compromise made a quarter of a cen- 
tury earlier. The former now demanded the exclusion of slavery 
from territory below the 36° 30' line (New Mexico), the latter its 
admission into territor}^ above the 36° 30' line (Oregon). 

centun,-. For eleven months his difficult path lay alternately over the icy crests of the moun- 
tains and through valleys parched with tropical heat. Orders had been sent from Washington 
to hold him at St. Louis, for fear his proposed expedition would give offense to ISIexico. But 
his wif e (Senator Benton's daughter) held the message until he was fairly started on his way. 



2 84 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

399. The Question of Slavery in the Mexican Cession. When 

therefore Polk, in his special message of July, 1848, urged Congress 
to proceed to the immediate organization of California and New 
Mexico, which had been under military regime since their conquest 
in 1846, there were several possible ways of dealing with the ques- 
tion of slavery in the territories under discussion. The Wilmot 
Proviso might be adopted, excluding slavery from the whole region ; 
the Calhoun-Davis theory^ might be accepted, opening the whole 
region to slavery ; the principle of the Missouri Compromise might 
be applied, dividing California and New Mexico into free and slave 
sections by a parallel of latitude running to the Pacific coa=t ; or the 
question of freedom or slavery might be left to the settlers of the 
territory themselves. 

400. The Doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty." This last solu- 
tion was proposed by Lewis Cass of Michigan and is known as the 
doctrine of "popular sovereignty," or, more familiarly, "squatter 
sovereignty." The new territories should be open to settlers, or 
"squatters," from free states and slave states on equal terms. Those 
territories which were suitable for slave labor would naturally attract 
slaveholders and would eventually apply for admission to the Union 
as slave states ; while the others would naturally be filled up with 
a free population and come in with state constitutions prohibiting 
slavery. 

401. The Campaign of 1848. Both of the great political parties 
tried to keep in favor with both sections of the country in the presi- 
dential campaign of 1848. The Democrats nominated Cass, a 
Northern man opposed to the Wilmot Proviso. The Whigs nominated 
General Zachary Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, a Southerner who 
repudiated the extreme proslavery doctrine of Calhoun and Davis. 
Taylor was a Louisiana sugar planter and the owner of several 
hundred slaves. But he had not manifested any interest in the 
extension of slavery. He had had no experience in political affairs 
and for years had not even voted. The Whigs nominated him for 
his brilliant record in the Mexican War, hoping that he would repeat 

1 That theory was, briefly, as follows : slaves were private property ; private property was 
subject to state laws, not national law ; the territories were the common property of the states, 
held in trust by the nation ; hence Congress could not pass any law excluding from the ter- 
ritories property whose possession was legal in the states. This theory made the Missouri 
Compromise unconstitutional. 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 285 

the sweeping victory of General Harrison in 1840. "Old Rough and 
Ready" was the campaign cry, recalling the "Tippecanoe and Tyler 
too" of eight years before. 

402. The New Free-Soil Party. In striking contrast to the 
evasive attitude of both Whigs and Democrats on the slavery ques- 
tion was the platform of a new party, the Free-Soilers, who declared 
that it was " the settled policy of the nation not to extend, na- 
tionalize, or encourage slavery, but to limit, localize, and dis- 
courage it." They nominated Van Buren, who had been passed 
over by the Democrats in 1844 to make room for a candidate 
in favor of annexing Texas, and inscribed on their banner, "Free 
soil, free speech, free labor, free men." The new party differed from 
the Garrison abolitionists in that it prized the Union and accepted 
the Constitution with all its compromises on slavery. It even differed 
in a most important respect from the Liberty party, which it largely 
absorbed. For the Liberty party of 1844 wished to abolish slavery 
in the Southern states, where it was protected by the Constitution, 
whereas the Free-Soilers demanded only its exclusion from the ter- 
ritories of the United States. The Liberty men denounced the exis- 
tence of slavery in any part of the Union ; the Free-Soilers opposed 
the extension of slavery to the trans-Mississippi territories of the 
Union. This distinction is of great importance, because it was the 
Free-Soil doctrine and not the abolitionist doctrine that was made 
the basis a few years later of the new Republican party, which finally 
overthrew slavery, 

403. The Election of Taylor. The Free-Soilers did not carry 
any states, but they elected enough congressmen to hold the balance 
between Whigs and Democrats in the sessions of 1849-185 1, and took 
enough votes from Cass in New York to give that state, and con- 
sequently the election, to Taylor, by an electoral vote of 163 to 127. 

404. Gold discovered in California. President Polk's term ex- 
pired March 4, 1849, without any step having been taken by Con- 
gress toward the organization of New IVIexico and California, acquired 
over a year before. The proslavery men demanded that their insti- 
tution should be admitted into the new territory and be legalized 
there by a definite statute. Their opponents declared that "no power 
in the world would make them vote to establish slavery where it 
did not exist." But while Congress was thus deadlocked, events 



286 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



TILfe 



occurred on the Pacific coast which gave a new aspect to the 
question. Just as the final negotiations for peace with Mexico 
were begun (January, 1848), gold was discovered in the Sacramento 
valley in California. As the news of the richness of the deposits 
spread, a wild rush into the gold fields began. Merchants, farmers, 
physicians, lawyers, artisans, shopkeepers, and servants abandoned 
their business to stake out claims in the gold valleys, from which 
thousands took their fortunes in a few weeks. ^ The fever extended 
even to the Atlantic coast. Men started on the nine months' sail 

around Cape Horn or, crossing 
the pestilence-laden Isthmus of 
Panama, fought like wild animals 
for a passage on the infrequent 
ships sailing up to the Californian 
coast. Others went "overland," 
making their way slowly across the 
Western deserts and mountains in 
their unwieldy "prairie schooners," 
the monotonous dread of famine 
and thirst varied only by the ex- 
citement of Indian attacks. The 
immigration by sea and land in the 
single year 1849 raised the popula- 
tion of California from 6000 to 
over 85,000 souls. 

405. California draws up a 
"Free" Constitution. The "Forty-niners," as these gold seekers 
were called, came almost wholly from the free states of the North. 
Migration across thousands of miles of desert country did not tempt 
the plantation owner with his slaves. Consequently, when delegates 
from the new Californian immigrants met at Monterey, in September, 
1849, to devise a government, they drew up a constitution excluding 
slavery by a unanimous vote. When Congress met in December, 
1849, therefore, California was no longer waiting to be organized 
as a territory, but was ready for admission to the Union as a state 
with a free constitution. 

1 The product of the California mines and washings was fabulous. The country was 
hailed as a modern El Dorado. Five years after the discovery, the gold yield was ^65,000,000 
in a single year. In fifty years over ^2,000,000,000 was taken from the mines. 




GOLD DISCOVERED AT SUTTER S 
-MILL, CALIFORNIA 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 287 

406. Congress faces a Crisis. With the example of California 
before them, the people of New Mexico were already taking steps to 
form a government for themselves. It was evident, therefore, that 
the Congress of 1 849-1 851 would be forced to deal with the organi- 
zation of the new territory. In spite of Taylor's first message of 
December, 1849, advising Congress to "abstain from the introduction 
of those exciting topics of a sectional character which have hitherto 
produced painful apprehensions in the public mind," — in plain words, 
not to quarrel about slavery, — Congress and the country at large 
believed that the acquisition of the new Western lands had brought 
the crisis which must now be faced. 

The Omnibus Bill 

407. The Thirty-first Congress. Probably no other gathering of 
public men in our history, except the convention which met at 
Philadelphia in 1787 to frame the Constitution of the United States, 
contained so many political geniuses of the first rank as the Senate 
which assembled in December, 1849. There met, for the last time, 
the great triumvirate of American statesmen. Clay, Webster, and 
Calhoun, — all three born during the Revolutionary War, and all so 
identified with every public question for a generation that to write 
the biography of any one of them would be to write the history 
of our country during that period. With them came a number of 
brilliant men whose names appear often on these pages, — Benton, 
Cass, Bell, Douglas, Davis, Seward, Chase, and Hale, the last three 
being the first pronounced antislavery delegation in the Senate. 
In the House, Democrats and Whigs were so evenly matched (112 
to 105) that the 13 Free-Soilers held the balance of power. The 
temper of Congress was shown at the very beginning of the session, 
when in a fierce struggle for the speakership, a fiery proslavery mem- 
ber from Georgia, Robert Toombs, declared amid hisses and applause 
that if the North sought to drive the slaveholder from New Mexico 
and California — land "purchased by the common blood and treasure 
of the nation" — and thereby "to fix a national degradation on half 
the states of the Confederacy," he was ready for disunion. 

408. Henry Clay introduces the Omnibus Bill. In this critical 
situation the aged Henry Clay, whose voice had been raised for 
moderation and conciliation ever since the days of the Missouri 



288 



SLAVERY AND THE WEST 



Compromise thirty years before, again came forward with measures 
calculated to reconcile the opposing sections (January 29, 1850). 
Clay proposed that (i) California should be admitted as a free 
state ; (2) the rest of the Mexican cession should be divided by the 
thirty-seventh parallel of latitude into the territories of Utah on the 
north and New Mexico on the south, both organized on the " squatter- 
sovereignty" principle^; (3) the boundaries of the slaveholding state 
of Texas should be cut down from 379,000 to 264,000 square miles, 
but in return Texas should receive $10,000,000 from the government 
to pay her war debt contracted before 1845 ! (4) the slave trade (but 
not slavery) should be prohibited in the District of Columbia ; (5) a 
new fugitive-slave law should be enacted, making the recovery of 
runaway negroes much easier than under the old law of 1793. This 
proposal of Clay's was called the Omnibus Bill, on account of the 
number of provisions which it included. - 

409. Conflicting Demands of North and South. We can see 
what a difficult task Clay had undertaken when we compare the 
demands of the radical leaders. North and South, on these questions. 
On the 



Question of 
(i) California 



(2) New Mexico 



(3) Texas 



(4) District of 

Columbia 

(5) Fugitive slaves 



The South demanded 

organization as a territory, 

admitting slavery 
legalization of slavery by 

Congress (at least below 

36° 30') 
the same boundaries as the 

Texan republic claimed 

in 1836 

no interference with slav- 
ery by Congress 

a strict law enforced by 
national authority, with 
no jury trial for negroes 



The North demanded 

immediate admission as a 

free state 
the application of the 

Wilmot Proviso 

a reduction in the size 
of Texas without any 
money compensation 

abolition of slavery 

jury trial for every negro 
claimed as a fugitive 
slave 



410. Debates on Clay's Compromise Bill. The debates on the 
compromise measures called forth some of the finest speeches ever 

1 This division of New Mexico was in reality the extension of the Missouri Compromise 
to the new territory. It was expected that slavery would enter New Mexico, but not the 
northern territory of Utah. 

- Strictly speaking, only the clauses referring to California, New Mexico, and Texas were 
called the Omnibus Bill. But the other two propositions (4 and 5) were so intimately connected 
with them, both in time and purpose, that the whole legislation maybe considered together. 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 289 

made in the Senate. Clay's fervid plea for harmony, in introducing 
his bills, was enhanced by the fact that the venerable statesman, now 
in his seventy-third year, had left the quiet of his well-earned retire- 
ment to make this supreme effort for the preservation of the Union, 
whose welfare and glory had been his chief pride since his boyhood's 
recollection of the inauguration of his great Virginia neighbor, George 
Washington. 

411. Calhoun's Speech. Calhoun was to speak on the fourth 
of March, 1850. But he was too enfeebled by the ravages of 
consumption to deliver his carefully prepared speech. He was 
borne to his place in the Senate chamber, where he sat, alive only 
in the great deep eyes which still flashed beneath his heavy brows, 
while his colleague, Senator Mason, read his speech. It was a mes- 
sage of despair. The encroachments of the North on the constitu- 
tional rights of the slaveholders had already proceeded so far, he said, 
that the great Kentuckian's plan of compromise was futile. The 
North was the aggressor. Her institutions were not attacked, her 
property was not threatened, her rights were not invaded. She must 
cease all agitation against slavery, return the fugitive slaves willingly, 
and restore to the South her equal rights in all parts of the Union 
and all acquired territory. Otherwise, the cords which had bound 
the states together for two generations would every one be broken, 
and our Republic would be dissolved into warring sections. It was 
Calhoun's last word. Before the month closed, he had passed beyond 
all earthly strife. 

412. Webster's Seventh-of-March Speech. Daniel Webster 
spoke on the seventh of March. Webster had put himself squarely 
on record against the extension of slavery into new territory. Be- 
sides his New York speech of 1837, already quoted (p. 271), he 
had said in the Oregon debates that his objections to slavery were 
*' irrespective of lines and latitudes, taking in the whole country and 
the whole question." The antislavery men of the North, therefore, 
to many of whom Webster was almost an idol, were bitterly dis- 
appointed when he spoke in favor of Clay's compromise measures. 
His love of the Union, and his desire to see peace reestablished be- 
tween the two sections, proved stronger than his hatred of slavery. 
He maintained that there was no danger that New Mexico would 
become slave territory, because the physical geography of the region 
forever excluded the cotton planter from its deserts and high plateaus. 



2 90 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

''I would not take pains," he said, '^ uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance 
of nature nor to reenact the will of God. I would put in no Wilmot 
Proviso for the mere purpose of a taunt or a reproach." He spoke 
in behalf of the fugitive-slave law, because such a law had always 
been on the statute books of the country. He denounced the 
abolitionists as men who had no right to set up their conscience 
in opposition to the law. In a fine peroration he im.plored his 
countrymen of the South to dismiss the av/ful thought of secession 
and cherish the Union forever. The Free-Soilers said that the great 
man's ambition to be the next president tempted him to forsake his 
principles in the seventh-of-lNIarch speech. But his sincere, though 
mistaken, belief that the Union could be saved by compromise is 
sufficient to account for his support of Clay's measures, without 
attributing base motives to him. 

413. Seward pleads for the Higher Law. Webster was an- 
swered a few days later by William H. Seward, the new Whig senator 
from New York. Seward thought the compromise vicious because 
it surrendered principles. The law might stand on the statute books, 
but the conscience of the people would condemn it and repudiate 
it. The Constitution might tolerate slavery, but there was " a higher 
law than the Constitution," namely, the moral law. Seward's appeal 
to the "higher law" was in line with the abolitionists' doctrine that 
the evil of slavery far outweighed all political, legal, or economic 
considerations. 

414. Chase's Speech. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, a Democrat con- 
verted to the Free-Soil doctrine, denounced the compromise as a 
weak surrender to the slaveholders' interests. In answer to Calhoun 
he declared that not the North but the South had been the aggressor 
ever since the days when threats and intimidation had forced upon 
the framers of the Constitution concessions to slavery. 

415. The Passage of the Omnibus Bill. The great debate on 
the compromise seemed no nearer its end in July than it had been 
in January. Senator Seward's influence over the President was so 
strong that any bill favoring the extension of slavery was likely to 
be vetoed. But when President Taylor died suddenly, July 9, 1850, 
the whole aspect of the question was changed. Vice President Fill- 
more, who succeeded him, was in favor of the compromise, and with 
the help of the administration the bills were passed through the 



THE COMPROMISE OF 18.50 



291 



Senate and the House by fair majorities, and signed by the President 
in August and September. The chief gain for the North in the com- 
promise measures of 1850 was the admission of California as a free 
state.' The prohibition of the slave trade in the tiny District of 
Columbia had no practical effect on the domestic slave trade, which 
was amply supplied by Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. The 
South, on the other hand, secured the opening of the whole of the 
Mexican cession east of California to slavery. The reduction of 




Free Status 

Free Tcnitories^^^^^ 



Slave States 



STATUS OF SLAVERY BY THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 

the boundaries of Texas was no disadvantage to the slave cause, 
since slavery was not forbidden in the territory transferred from 
Texas to New Mexico, while the payment of $10,000,000 to Texas 
set that state on .the path to prosperity, which made it a powerful 
aid to the Confederate cause in the great struggle of the Civil War 
ten years later, 

416. The New Fugitive-Slave Law. Finally, the new fugitive- 
slave law brought the whole machinery of the United States into 
play, if necessary, to recover a runaway negro. The fugitive was not 
allowed a trial, either in the state where he was seized or in the 



1 Since there were fifteen free and fifteen slave states at the beginning of 1S50, the 
admission of California gave the Senate a majority for the North. After 1S50 no new slave 
states were admitted. 



292 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

state from which he had fled. The magistrate's fee was twice as 
large when he handed the negro over to the claimant as when he 
declared the negro free. The alleged fugitive was not allowed to 
testify in his own behalf. The United States marshals were heavily 
fined if they let the reclaimed fugitive escape. At the call of the 
marshals all good citizens of any state must aid in the seizure of the 
runaway negro, and persons willfully preventing his arrest or helping 
his escape were subject to a fine of $1000, or six months' imprison- 
ment, in addition to damages to the owner, up to $1000, for the 
value of the slave. The new fugitive-slave law, therefore, sought 
to guarantee the protection of slave property in every part of 
the United States by making every man and woman of a free 
state a partner in the business of restoring to his master the fugitive 
who had followed the Northern Star to the ''land of freedom." 

A Four Years' Truce 

417. The Finality of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise 
IMeasures of 1850 were regarded by the vast majority of the people 
of the United States as a final settlement of the sectional disputes 
over slavery. The status of slavery was now fixed in every square 
mile of our domain from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Henry Clay 
was hailed as "the great Pacificator," and the foremost statesmen 
of both parties devoted their best talents to proving that the Com- 
promise of 1850 was the just and sole basis on which the Union 
could be preserved. The agitation over slavery in the new Western 
territory had caused much talk of disunion in the South. A con- 
vention was assembled at Nashville, Tennessee, in the early summer 
of 1850, to decide on what terms the cotton states would still remain 
in the Union. But the passage of the Compromise Measures quieted 
the disunion movement. The Unionists were triumphant in the elec- 
tions of 185 1 in every Southern state but South Carolina. 

418. The "Underground Railroad." In the Northern states it 
was harder to make the people accept the Compromise of 1850. In 
spite of the efforts of such persuasive advocates as Webster and 
Choate in the East, and Douglas and Cass in the West, the pulpit, 
press, and platform would not cease in their condemnation of the 
new fugitive-slave law. A public meeting in Indiana declared its 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 



293 



"absolute refusal to obey the inhuman and diabolical provisions" 
of the law, and the declaration was indorsed by hundreds of mass 
meetings from Boston to Chicago. For several years there had been 
in operation in New York, Pennsylvania, and all along the northern 
bank of the Ohio River a system called the "underground railroad," 
whose object was to give food, shelter, and pecuniary aid to the 
negro escaping across the line into the free states. Prominent citizens 
were engaged in this work, offering their barns and sheds, and even 
their houses, as "stations" on the "underground." The fugitive was 




CHIEF ROUTES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 



passed on from station to station with remarkable secrecy and dis- 
patch until he reached the shores of Lake Erie and took ship for 
Canada. The people of the free states felt fairly secure in breaking 
the old fugitive-slave law of 1793, because that law depended on 
the state authorities for its execution, and in a notable case (Prigg vs. 
Pennsylvania), in 1842, the Supreme Court of the United States had 
decided that the Constitution did not compel the officers of a state 
to assist in restoring fugitive slaves. The new law of 1850, however, 
if strictly enforced, would have closed every station on the "under- 
ground" and made the soil of Ohio as dangerous for the escaping 
negro as the canebrakes of Louisiana or the swamps of Virginia. 

419. The Democratic Victory of 1852. In the presidential cam- 
paign of 1852 the Democrats nominated General Franklin Pierce 



294 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

of New Hampshire, a man of winning personality, with a creditable 
but not brilliant record as a legislator and soldier. The Whigs, with 
both their great leaders gone,^ made a desperate attempt to win the 
presidency with their third military candidate, General Winfield 
Scott, 'Hhe hero of Lundy's Lane and Chapultepec." Pierce won 
a sweeping victory, carrying all the states of the Union but four. 
He announced in his inaugural address that a ''sense of repose and 
security had been restored throughout the country," and expressed 
the "fervent hope that no sectional or fanatical excitement might- 
again threaten the durability of our institutions or obscure the light 
of our prosperity." 

420. The Prosperity of the Country. When Pierce mentioned 
" the light of our prosperity," he struck the real note of the truce 
of 1 8 50- 1 8 54. It was a business man's peace. The commercial and 
industrial classes were tired of the agitation over slavery. They were 
glad to have Congress stop discussing the Missouri Compromise and 
the Wilmot Proviso, and attend to the business interests of the coun- 
try. An era of great prosperity was opening. The discovery of 
immense deposits of gold and silver in California ; the extension 
of the wheat fields into Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota ; the great 
increase in the products of the Northern mills and factories ; and 
the growing fleet of our merchant marine, were all signs of rapidly 
increasing wealth. The railroad mileage of the country up to the 
year 1848 was less than 6000, but during the next ten years over 
16,500 miles of new track were laid. Between 1850 and 1855 the im- 
portant railroads of the Atlantic coast (the New York Central, the 
Erie, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio) were all connected 
with the Great Lakes or the Ohio River .^ Thus the immense northern 
basin of the Mississippi, which, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, 
had been connected with the Gulf of Mexico, through the highway 
of the great river, now began to be joined with the Eastern states 
and to send its growing trade through the Great Lakes and over 
the Atlantic-seaboard railroads. 

1 Clay died in June, 1852, carrying to his grave the Whig party which he had called into 
existence twenty years before, when he forced through Congress the bill for the recharter of 
the Bank (1832) and rallied to his standard the forces of opposition to Andrew Jackson. 
Webster followed Clay to the grave in October, 1852. 

2 An interesting result of this new connection was shown in the immense growth of the 
Lake cities, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, in the decade 1830-1860. 




CANALS AND RAILROADS OPERATED IN 1850 



296 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

421. The Reign of "King Cotton" in the South. The wealth 
of the South seemed even more firm in its foundations and more 
rapid in its increase. An apparently limitless demand for cotton 
by the mills of America and Europe encouraged the cultivation of 
that staple to the neglect of every other form of industry. By 1850 the 
value of the cotton crop was over $100,000,000 annually, while 
the rice and sugar crops combined yielded less than $16,000,000. In 
the same year, of the total of $137,000,000 of exports from the United 
States, $72,000,000 (or 53 per cent) was in cotton, as against" 
$26,000,000 (or 19 per cent) in grain and provisions. Such a trade 
naturally led the Southerners to believe that slavery was the basis 
of the prosperity of the country. '' Cotton is king ! " they said. 
"In the 3,000,000 bags of cotton that slave labor annually throws 
upon the world, we are doing more to advance civilization than 
all the canting philanthropists of New and Old England will do in 
a century."^ 

422. Increased Immigration to America. The demand for 
laborers in the United States, supplemented by various forms of 
distress in Europe, caused the migration of many thousands of 
foreigners to our shores in the middle years of the century. The 
utter ruin of the potato crop in 1845 reduced Ireland to famine, 
and the revolutions of the famous year 1848 threw central Europe 
into political turmoil. The Irish and German immigrants sought in 
America a land of plenty and a refuge for democracy.^ Even distant 
China, disturbed by war and rebellion, sent some 25,000 of her 
poverty stricken laborers to our Pacific coast, where their low stand- 
ards of living and their strange oriental habits caused economic and 
social friction. The Germans tended to move westward and helped to 

1 The Southern writers were guilty of two serious errors in their economics : first, in 
mistaking the great wealth of a few planters for general prosperity ; secondly, in thinking 
that free negro labor was impossible. There were about 75,000 large planters in the South 
in 1850, out of a population of 5,000,000 whites. Their prosperity was that of "a dominant 
minority," and was not diffused through all classes as in the North. Again, while the value 
of the cotton crop in 1S50 with slave labor was ^105,000,000, in 1880 under free negro labor 
it was j?275,ooo,ooo, and in 1910 over ^700,000,000. Slave labor produced 2,200,000 bales of 
cotton in 1850; free labor produced 10,650,000 bales in 1910. 

2 American sympathy for the Hungarians, who were fighting for independence from 
oppressive Austria, was freely expressed. When Austria protested, Daniel Webster, our 
Secretary of State, in 1850, wrote a defiant letter to the Austrian charge at Washington, 
declaring " the right of the American people to sympathize with the efforts of any nation to 
acquire liberty." Louis Kossuth, the great Hungarian patriot, visited America as the nation's 
guest in 1851-52, but failed to get substantial help for his cause. 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 297 

develop the agricultural regions of our country, while the Irish for 
the most part were content to remain in the cities of the Atlantic 
coast. From 84,066 in 1840, the immigrants increased to 427,833 
in 1854. 

423. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. It seemed as though no decade 
of our history could pass without some new cause for ill feeling 
toward Great Britain. To the perpetual quarrel over the rights 
of our fishermen off the Newfoundland coast, and the disputes over 
our northern boundaries, there was added in the middle of the nine- 
teenth century an important controversy in Central America. We 
had looked forward for years to building a canal cutting the isthmus 
which connects the two great continents of the Western Hemisphere, 
and had even made a treaty in 1846 with the Spanish- American 
republic of New Granada (now Colombia), in which we agreed 
to keep open to all nations, on the same terms, any canal or railroad 
built across the Isthmus of Panama. The discovery of gold in Cali- 
fornia shortly afterwards (1848) set American capitalists, headed by 
Cornelius Vanderbilt, actively to planning transportation routes 
across the Isthmus. Here they came into collision with the British, 
who had a colony in Central America, and were attempting to extend 
their "protectorate" over miles of the coast. After long negotiations 
Clayton, our Secretary of State under President Taylor, came to an 
agreement with the British minister, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, in 
1850. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which remained in force until 
the end of the nineteenth century, provided that the United States 
and Great Britain should jointly guarantee the neutrality of any 
canal built across the Isthmus. Each government pledged itself not 
to seek exclusive control over the canal, never to erect any fortifica- 
tions upon it, or to acquire any colonies in Central America. Each 
promised that it would extend its protection to any company that 
should undertake the work of building a canal, and would use its 
influence with the governments of Central America to give their 
aid to such a project. 

424. Our Interest in Cuba. The most critical incident in our 
mid-century diplomacy, however, concerned Cuba. That rich island 
possession of Spain, lying just off our coast, had always been regarded 
with especial interest by our statesmen. Expansionists had wanted it 
for the United States: others had been afraid that it might pass 



298 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

into the hands of a strong power Hke England or France. When 
President Polk offered Spain $120,000,000 for the island (eight 
times the price paid for the great Louisiana territory) the ministers 
at Madrid replied that they '' had rather see Cuba sunk in the ocean 
than transferred to any power." Still, Spanish government was op- 
pressive in Cuba, and the island was in a chronic state of revolt. 
In 185 1 about fifty American citizens, some of them young men 
belonging to the best families of New Orleans, joined a noted ad- 
venturer, named Lopez, in a desperate attempt to seize Cuba. When 
the men were captured on the Cuban coast and promptly shot, a 
mob at New Orleans sacked the Spanish consulate, tore down the 
ensign of Castile, and defaced the portrait of Queen Isabella. Daniel 
Webster apologized for this insult to Spain, but a little later Webster's 
successor in the State Department, William L. Marcy, was asking 
the ministry at Madrid to apologize to the United States for the 
unjust seizure and condemnation of the American steamer Black 
Warrior by the authorities at Havana. Relations between the United 
States and Spain were severely strained. 

425. The Ostend Manifesto. During Pierce's administration 
(1853-1857) the influence of the South was strong at Washington; 
and the South wanted Cuba for the extension of its slave area. 
Pierce sent as minister to Spain Pierre Soule of Louisiana, the most 
ardent annexationist in the country. Soule met Mason, our minister 
to France, and Buchanan, our minister to England, at the Belgian 
town of Ostend in the summer of 1854, and there the three ministers 
issued the famous Ostend Manifesto, which declared that the pos- 
session of Cuba was necessary to the peace of the United States. If, 
"actuated by stubborn pride and a false sense of honor," Spain 
should refuse to sell Cuba, then we were "justified by every law, 
human and divine," in wresting the island from her by force. There 
was, as a matter of fact, no law, human or divine, that could justify 
the language of the Ostend Manifesto or the deed of pure robbery 
which it proposed. The cautious Marcy disowned the Manifesto 
and a few months later accepted Spain's tardy apology for the Black 
Warrior affair. It was reserved for a far greater disaster to another 
American vessel forty-four years later — the destruction of the Maine 
in Havana harbor — to precipitate the war which cost Spain "the 
Pearl of the Antilles." 



THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 299 

References 

The New Territory: G. P. Garrison, Westward Extension (American 
Nation Series), chaps, xvi, xvii, xix; Edward Stanwood, History of the Presi- 
dency, chap, xviii; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, a History, Vol. I, 
chaps, xv-xviii; T. C. Smith, The Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in the North- 
west (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. VI) ; J. R. Lowell, The Biglow Papers 
(First Series) ; Stewart Edward White, The Forty-Niners (Chronicles, Vol. 
XXV) ; E. L. BoGART, Industrial History of the United States, chaps, xviii-xx; 
J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. VII, chap. 
Ixxxiii; Jesse Macy, The Anti-Slavery Crusade (Chronicles, Vol. XXVHI), 
chaps, vi-viii; A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, 
Nos. 15-18; Salmon P. Chase, chap. v. 

The Omnibus Bill: Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 19-22; Garrison, chap, xx; 
William MacDonald, Select Documents of United States History, lyyd-iSdi, 
Nos. 78-83; G. T. Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, Vol. II, chaps, xxxvi, xxxvii; 
Carl Schurz, Henry Clay, Vol. II, chap, xxvi; Jefferson Davis, Rise and 
Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. I, chaps, ii, iii; J. F. Rhodes, History 
of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, pp. 119-198; J. W. 
Burgess, The Middle Period, chaps, xvii, xviii. 

A Four Years' Truce: Smith, Parties and Slavery (Am. Nation), chaps, 
i-vi; W. E. Dodd, Expansion and Conflict (Riverside History, Vol. Ill), chap, x; 
Stanwood, chap, xix; Rhodes, Vol. I, chap, iii; MacDonald, No. 77; Old 
South Leaflets, No. iii; A. T. Hadley, Railroad Transportation, its His- 
tory and its Laws, chaps, i, ii; D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United 
States, chaps, x, xi; Garrison, chap, xviii; I. D. Travis, The History of the 
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (Michigan Political Science Publications, Vol. II, 
No. 8) ; J. H. Latane, The Diplomacy of the United States in Regard to Cuba 
(American Historical Association Report, 1897, PP- 217-277) ; James Schouler, 
History of the United States, Vol. V, chaps, xx, xxi. 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. John C. Fremont's Explorations: Old South Leaflets, No. 45; R. G. 
Thwaites, Rocky Mountain Exploration, pp. 228-243; J. C. Fremont, Report 
of Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to 
Oregon and North Carolina in the Years 1843-1844; Jessie B. Fremont, 
Souvenirs of my Time, pp. 189-209; Century Magazine, Vol. XIX, pp. 759-780 
(with interesting illustrations). 

2. Daniel Webster and the Slavery Question: McMaster, Life of 
Webster, pp. 241-254, 303-324; Rhodes, Vol. I, pp. 137-161; Alexander 
Johnston, American Orations, Vol. II, pp. 161-201 ; H. C. Lodge, Daniel Web- 
ster, pp. 301-332; Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 20, 21; J. G. Whittier, Ichabod; 
W. C. Wilkinson, Daniel Webster and the Compromise of 1850 (Scribner's, 
Vol. XII, pp. 411-425). 

3. The Underground Railway: Hart, Vol. Ill, Nos. 172, 183; Vol. IV, 
Nos. 29-32; W. H, Siebert, The Underground Railway, pp. 18-76; B. T. 



300 SLAVERY AND THE WEST 

Washington, The Story of the Negro, Vol. I, pp. 215-250; McMaster, Vol. 
VII, pp. 240-257; Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 28-53; Alexander John- 
ston (ed. J. A. Woodbum), American Political History, 1763-1876, Vol. II, 
pp. 127-140. 

4. Gold and Politics in California, 1849-1850: Josiah Royce, California, 
pp. 220-246, 278-356; E. E. Sparks, The Expansion of the American People, 
PP- 336-350; Rhodes, Vol. I, pp. 111-116; Schouler, Vol. V, pp. 130-146; 
J. S. HiTTELL, The Discovery of Gold in California {Century Magazine, Vol. 
XIX, pp. 525-536); McMaster, Vol. VII, pp. 585-614; Bayard Taylor, El 
Dorado. 

5. Mid-Century Plans for a Canal across the Isthmus: McMaster, 
Vol. VII, pp. 552-577; Latane, Diplomatic Relations of the United States 
and Spanish America, pp. 176-195; T. J. Lawrence, Disputed Questions in 
Modern International Law, pp. 89-142 ; W. F. Johnson, Four Centuries of 
the Panama Canal, pp. 51-77; Henry Huberich, The Trans-Isthmian Canals 
pp. 6-15. 



PARTVL THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



CHAPTER XIV 

APPROACHING THE CRISIS 

The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the 
Formation of the Republican Party 

426. The Louisiana Purchase Territory in 1850. By the terms 
of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 all the Louisiana Purchase ter- 
ritory north of the line 36° 30', except the state of Missouri itself, 
was closed to slavery. It was an immense region of over half a mil- 
lion square miles, larger than all the free states east of the Missis- 
sippi River combined. While the attention of the country had been 
fixed on the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of the territory of 
Oregon in the Far West, the Mexican War, and the organization of 
the vast Mexican cession of California and New Mexico, this 
Louisiana territory had remained almost unnoticed. Up to the middle 
of the nineteenth century only the single state of Iowa (1846) and 
the single territory of Minnesota (1849) had been formed out of it. 
The rest of the region, extending from the Missouri River to the 
Rockies, was unorganized Indian territory in 1850, with less than 
1000 white inhabitants. The addition to our domain, however, of 
the land west of the Rockies at once made the organization of the 
middle part of the Louisiana region (then known as Nebraska) im- 
portant as a link between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific. 
Thousands of emigrants were passing through the country on their 
way to the gold fields of California, and the settlers of Missouri and 
Iowa, with the irrepressible American frontier spirit, were eager to 
drive the Indians from their borders and to press westward into the 
rich valleys of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. 

427. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois 
was chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. He was a 

301 



302 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



self-made man of tremendous energy, a masterful politician, and an 
unrivaled debater, who had come from a Vermont farm to the new 
Western country as a very young man and had risen rapidly through 
minor offices to a judgeship in the supreme court .of Illinois. He 
was sent to the House of Representatives in 1843 ^^^ to the Senate 
in 1846. Although then but thirty-three years of age, Douglas im- 
mediately assumed an important place in the Senate through his 
brilliant powers of debate. He was soon recognized as the leader of 
the Democratic party in the North, and after the death of Calhoun, 

Clay, and Webster he became the fore- 
most figure in American public life. On 
January 4, 1854, Douglas reported a 
bill for the organization of the territory 
west of Missouri (Nebraska) on the 
principle of '^ squatter sovereignty " as 
set forth in the Compromise of 1850. 

Douglas did not mention the Missouri 
Compromise in this bill, but some days 
later, on the advice of the Southern 
senators, and with the approval of 
President Pierce, he substituted for it a 
new bill which expressly repealed the 
Missouri Compromise and divided the 
territory into two parts by the parallel 
of 40° north latitude, — Kansas to the 
south (into which it was expected slavery would enter) and Nebraska 
to the north (which would probably be free soil). 

428. Effect of the Bill on the North. The indignation of the 
North over the proposed annulment of the Missouri Compromise 
was instantaneous and strong. The day after the Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill was reported, the Free-Soil men in Congress, led by Senator 
Chase of Ohio, issued a spirited protest entitled " The Appeal of the 
Independent Democrats." They denounced the bill as " a gross vio- 
lation of a sacred pledge " and called upon all good citizens to protest 
by every means possible against " this enormous crime." Hundreds ot 
mass meetings were held in the North to denounce the bill. The 
legislatures of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and 
Wisconsin sent their protests to Congress. Senator Seward of New 




STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 303 

York wrote, "The storm that is rising is such a one as this country 
has never yet seen." Douglas was denounced as a turncoat, a traitor, 
a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, who had sold himself to the South for the 
presidential nomination. He was burned in effigy so frequently that 
he himself said he could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light 
of the fires. 

429. Motives for Douglas's Action. Douglas had voted in the 
House for the 36° 30' line at the time of the annexation of Texas 
in 1845, Slid declared in a speech in the Senate four years later 
that the Missouri Compromise was "canonized in the hearts of 
the American people as a thing which no ruthless hand would 
ever be reckless enough to disturb." Yet he now maintained that 
by the Compromise of 1850 the American people had substituted 
for the principle of a line dividing free territory jrom slave ter- 
ritory the new principle of the choice 0} the people of the territory 
themselves, and that he acquiesced gladly in that change of prin- 
ciple. Douglas's motive for thus shifting his ground is not wholly 
clear. It is true that he could not hope to win the Democratic 
nomination for president without the favor of the South, and 
that the men who in all probability would be his rivals for the 
nomination in 1856 were all, in one way or another, courting 
the favor of the South in 1854.^ It is true also that he was heavily 
interested in railway projects for opening up the Far West. But all 
this does not prove that Douglas, with his hearty confidence in the 
ability of the people of a locality to manage their own affairs, was 
not perfectly honest in preferring the "popular-sovereignty" prin- 
ciple of 1850 to the Missouri-Compromise principle of 1820. 

430. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed. In the debate on the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill Douglas proved himself the master of all his 
opponents. Alone he faced the fire of Wade, Chase, Seward, Sumner, 
and Everett, — all masterly speakers, — meeting their attacks at every 
point with a vigor and tact which won even from his adversaries 
expressions of admiration. On March 4, 1854, after a continuous 
session of seventeen hours, Douglas carried the bill through the 
Senate by a vote of 37 to 14. It passed the House on May 22 by 

1 These men were President Pierce, who was almost slavishly following the guidance of 
his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis ; Secretary of State Marcy, who advocated the annexa- 
tion of Cuba ; and our minister to England, Buchanan, who signed the Ostend Manifesto. 



304 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



the close vote of 113 to 100 and was signed by Pierce. Thus the 
Missouri Compromise, for thirty-four years " canonized in the hearts 
of the American people," was repealed, and 485,000 square miles of 
territory that had been "forever" dedicated to freedom were opened 
to the slaveholder. Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the foremost historian 
of this period, says that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was " the most 




Eree States ^ 
Slave States E^ 



OUR WESTERN TERRITORIES, 1854 



momentous measure that passed Congress from the day that the 
Senators and Representatives first met to the outbreak of the Civil 
War." It was the end of compromise on the slavery question. It was 
the declaration on the part of the South that no more lines of latitude 
or acts of Congress could debar slavery from the territories of the 
United States. It suddenly woke the North to the realization that 
nothing would satisfy the slaveholder short of the recognition of 
slavery as a national institution. 

431. Growth of Abolitionist Sentiment. The first effect of the 
bill was a great accession to the antislavery ranks in the North. 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 305 

Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, the most influen- 
tial newspaper in the country at this period, wrote, " Pierce and 
Douglas have made more abolitionists in three months than Garrison 
and Phillips could have done in half a century." Deprived of the 
free territory of the West, the abolitionists determined that hence- 
forth there should be no quarter given to slavery in the free states 
of the North. They began again to resist the Fugitive-Slave Law of 
1850, now not a "band of fanatics," but a great company of men 
of culture, rank, and wealth,^ 

432. The Personal-Liberty Acts. Ten states of the North passed 
Personal-Liberty acts forbidding their officers to aid in the seizure 
of fugitive slaves, denying the use of their jails for the detention 
or imprisonment of fugitives, ordering their courts to provide jury 
trials for all negroes seized in the state, and generally annulling the 
provisions of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850. When the fugitive 
Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston in 1854, a "mob," in which 
were some of the most prominent authors, preachers, and philan- 
thropists of the city, attempted to rescue him by battering down 
the doors of the jail. He had to be escorted to the wharf by battal- 
ions of United States artillery and marines, through streets cleared 
by the cavalry and lined with 50,000 hooting, hissing, jeering, groan- 
ing men, under windows draped in mourning and hung with the 
American flag bordered with black. It cost the United States govern- 
ment $40,000 to return Anthony Burns to his Virginia master. 

433. The Break-up of the Whig Party. The political effect of 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was no less remarkable than 
the moral effect, for it led directly to the formation of a new and 
powerful party. The Whigs, although badly beaten by Pierce in 
the election of 1852, had nevertheless sent over 60 members to Con- 
gress. A majority of the Southern Whigs voted for the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, while every single one of the 45 Northern Whigs voted 
against it. This vote showed that the old Whig party was hopelessly 
split by the slavery issue into a Northern and a Southern wing. The 

1 The Abolitionist movement was greatly stimulated by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 
novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (iS52),a pathetic but exaggerated portrayal of the cruelties 
practiced by the inhuman slave driver. The author implored "the Christian and humane 
people of the North" not to acquiesce in the new Fugitive-Slave Law. Her novel, selling 
by the hundreds of thousands of copies, so influenced public opinion in the North that 
President Lincoln, meeting her later in the White House, greeted her as " the woman who 
brought on the Civil War." 





^ Free states 



^^ Slave states 

S^^ Territory open to slavery 



K'ji-^rj Territory closed to slavery 

THE STATUS OF SLAVERY, 1844-1854 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 307 

proslavery Whigs of the South gradually went over to the Democratic 
party until, by the end of 1855, there were only the mere remnants 
of the once powerful Whig party south of the Potomac.^ In the 
North the Whigs were stronger, but the Northern Whigs alone could 
not hope either to control Congress or to elect a president. They 
hoped that the other Anti-Nebraska men of the North — the Free- 
Soilers, the Know-Nothings,^ and the Anti-Nebraska Democrats — 
would join them in making a great new Whig-Unionist party. But 
they were mistaken. Most of the Northern Democrats were skill- 
fully rallied to the party standards by the incomparable activity of 
Douglas ; while the Free-Soil men had no intention of subordinating 
their one great issue of slavery to the questions of tariff, finance, or 
any other part of the Whig platform. If the Anti-Nebraska Whigs 
wished to see a united North, they themselves would be forced to 
come into the new party which was already gathering the determined 
antislavery men out of every political camp. 

434. Formation of the New Republican Party. This new party 
was formed at Jackson, INIichigan, a few weeks after the passage of 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, in response to a call for a state mass 
meeting of all men opposed to the extension of slavery (July 6, 
1854). No hall was large enough to hold the immense gathering, 
which adjourned to a grove of oaks on the outskirts of the town. 
Amid great enthusiasm the meeting declared that slavery was a 
great " moral, social, and political evil," demanded the repeal of the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act and of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850, and 
resolved that "postponing all differences with regard to political econ- 
omy or administrative policy," they would " act cordially and faith- 
fully in unison" until the contest with slavery was ended. They 
adopted the name " Republican," ^ nominated an entire state ticket, 

1 The process of the dissolution of the Whig party in the South began when thousands 
deserted Scott for Pierce in the presidential election of 1852, fearing that Scott was " tinged 
with Free-Soil principles." The vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill completed the process. 

2 The Know-Nothing party was the most curious development in our political life. It 
originated in 1852 as a protest against foreign influence in our politics. It was more like a 
lodge, or secret order, than a political party. The chaos in the old Whig and Democratic 
parties produced by the Kansas-Nebraska agitation drove thousands into the ranks of the 
Know-Nothings simply because they had no other place to go to. Thus that queer secret 
society actually carried several states in the elections of 1854 and 1855 and gained a 
momentary political significance far beyond its real importance. 

8 The organization and the name had both been suggested by an antislavery meeting at 
Ripon, Wisconsin, before the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had passed. 



3o8 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

and invited other states to follow them. State after state responded, 
organizing the Anti-Nebraska forces into the Republican party, until 
at the close of 1855 the chairmen of the Republican committees in 
nine states of the Union issued a call for a national Republican 
convention to be held at Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856, for the 
purpose of organizing a national Republican party and appointing 
a time and place for nominating a presidential candidate. From 
this convention the Republican party issued full-grown. 

435. The Mistake of Douglas. The formation of the Republican 
party was a direct result of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 
The party was really called into existence by Stephen A, Douglas, 
who later had cause bitterly to regret his blunder in consolidating 
the antislavery spirit of the North. There was no good reason in the 
year 1854 for disturbing the compromise agreed on in 1850. On 
the basis of that compromise the Democratic party had achieved an 
overwhelming success at the polls in 1852 and the Southern states 
had declared their adherence to the Union. Prosperity was general ; 
the country seemed calm. One might have prophesied at the opening 
of the year 1854 a long and undisturbed tenure of power for the 
Democratic part3^ At the end of that year the country was in a 
ferment. The Democratic majority of 84 in the House had been 
changed to a minority of 75. A new party had been formed which 
in a few years was to defeat the Democrats both of the North and 
of the South and give the death blow to the institution of slavery, 
to which the Kansas-Nebraska Act had seemed to open new and 
promising territory. 

"A House divided against Itself" 

436. The Colonization of Kansas. When the Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill became law, Douglas boasted that "the struggle over slavery 
was forever banished from the halls of Congress to the Western 
plains." He was mistaken about its being banished from the halls 
of Congress, but right about its reaching the Western plains. While 
the bill was still pending, a group of determined Free-Soilers in 
Massachusetts resolved that if the question of slavery was to be left 
to the settlers of Kansas, then Kansas should be settled by anti- 
slavery men. Accordingly, at the suggestion of Eli Thayer of 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 309 

Worcester, they formed the New England Emigrant Aid Society, 
whose object was to conduct companies of emigrants to the new 
territories and help them with loans for the erection of houses and 
the cultivation of farms. The first colony, some thirty men and 
women, arrived in Kansas in the summer of 1854. By March, 1855, 
several hundred emigrants had come and were busy building the 
town of Lawrence,^ on the Kansas River. In less than three months 
over fifty dwellings were built, a hotel and public buildings were 
started, and Lawrence had taken on the aspect of a thriving New 
England town. 

437. The Missourians "invade" Kansas. The attempt to 
" abolitionize Kansas" exasperated the South and, above all, the 
neighboring state of Missouri. The ]Missourians called the New 
England emigrants "an army of hirelings," '^reckless and desperate 
fanatics," who " had none of the purpose of the real pioneers," but 
were clothed and fed, as they were transported, by abolitionist 
" meddlers " of the North, who wanted to prevent a fair and natural 
settlement of Kansas. Large bands of armed men (the "border 
ruffians") from Missouri swarmed into the Kansas territory whenever 
elections were held. In the spring of 1855 their thousands of fraudu- 
lent votes elected a territorial legislature, which removed its meeting 
place to a point near the Missouri border and proceeded to enact 
a code of laws in which the severest penalties were decreed against 
anyone who attempted to aid slaves to escape or even spoke or wrote 
of slavery as illegal. Companies of volunteers from Alabama, Flor- 
ida, South Carolina, and Georgia marched to Kansas to join the 
Missourians in the battle " for slaver}^ and the South." 

438. Civil War in Kansas. The Free-Soil emigrants in Kansas, 
who now numbered over 3000, refused to recognize the legislature, 
elected by the "border ruffians" from Missouri. Their delegates met 
at Topeka, organized an antislavery government, and, following the 
example of California six years earlier, applied to Congress for im- 
mediate admission to the Union as a free state. In the spring of 

1 The town was named after A. A. Lawrence, a noted merchant and philanthropist of 
Boston, who was one of the chief supporters of the Emigrant Aid Society. John Greenleaf 
Whittier, the abolitionist poet, gave the colonists their marching song : 

We cross the prairie as of old the pilgrims crossed the sea. 

To make the West, as they the East, the homestead of the free ! 



310 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



1856, then, there were two hostile governments facing each other in 
Kansas, each charging the other with fraud and violence. The Free- 
Soil party was determined that Kansas should not be sacrificed to 
the slave interests of Missouri. " If slavery in Missouri is impossible 
with freedom in Kansas," said their leader, Robinson, " then slavery 
in Missouri must die that freedom in Kansas may live." The pro- 
slavery men, on the other hand, declared that they would win Kansas 
though they had to wade in blood to their knees. It was inevitable 
that deeds of violence should occur under such circumstances. 




CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS, 1855-1857 



On May 21, 1856, the Missourians attacked the Free-Soil town 
of Lawrence, destroying the public buildings, breaking up the aboli- 
tionist presses, and burning private dwellings. The sack of Lawrence 
was frightfully avenged three days later. John Brown, an old man 
of the stock of the Puritans, with the Puritan idea that he was ap- 
pointed by God to smite His enemies, led a small band of men 
(including his four sons) to a proslavery settlement on the banks of 
Pottawatomie Creek and there dragging five men from their beds 
at dead of night, massacred them in cold blood. Thenceforward 
there was war in "Bleeding Kansas" when Free-Soilers met pro- 
slavery men. "Bitter remembrances filled each man's mind," wrote 
an English visitor to Kansas, "and impelled to daily acts of hostility 
and not infrequent bloodshed." 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 311 

439. How President Pierce dealt with the situation. President 
Pierce ignored the situation as long as he could, declaring in his 
message of December, 1855, that there had been disorderly acts in 
Kansas, but that nothing had occurred as yet " to justify the inter- 
position of the federal executive." The next month, however. Pierce 
sent a special message to Congress, in which he took sides squarely 
with the proslavery party in Kansas. He did not deny that there 
might have been " irregularities " in the election of the territorial 
legislature, but he recognized that legislature as the lawful one and 
declared his intention of supporting it with all the authority of the 
United States. The message plainly shows the hand of the Secretary 
of War, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who controlled the adminis- 
tration of President Pierce. 

440. Brooks's Assault on Sumner. On the twentieth of May 
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a speech in the Senate on 
"The Crime against Kansas," which was the most unsparing phi- 
lippic ever pronounced in Congress. Sumner lashed the slaveholders 
with a tongue of venom. He spared neither coarse abuse nor scath- 
ing sarcasm. Among the senators especially singled out for Sumner's 
shafts was A. P. Butler of South Carolina, who was ill and absent 
from Washington at the time of the speech. Two days later Preston 
Brooks, a representative from South Carolina and a relative of 
Senator Butler, entered the Senate chamber late in the afternoon, 
when Sumner was bending over his desk at work, and beat him almost 
to death with a heavy gutta-percha cane.^ 

441. The First Republican Convention. Sumner's speech, the 
attack of Brooks, the sack of Lawrence, and the massacre on the 
Pottawatomie all occurred within the five days May 20-24, 1856. 
These events were a sad commentary on "popular sovereignty" in 
Kansas and 'a sinister omen for the approaching presidential cam- 
paign. The Republican nominating convention arranged for at 
Pittsburgh (see page 308) met at Philadelphia, June 17. The plat- 
form adopted declared that it was "both the right and the duty of 
Congress" to prohibit slavery in the territories. It condemned the 

1 Sumner's speech had been outrageous, but Brooks's attack was unspeakably base and 
cowardly. The motion to expel Brooks from Congress failed of the necessary two-thirds 
vote, and when he resigned shortly afterwards, he was immediately reelected by the almost 
unanimous voice of his district in South Carolina. 



312 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

policy of the administration in Kansas, denounced the Ostend 
Manifesto, and demanded the immediate admission of Kansas as a 
free state. Chase and Seward, the leading men of the party, were 
both passed over on account of their former prominence in the Demo- 
cratic and the Whig party respectively ; and John C. Fremont, of 
California, "the Pathfinder," renowned for his explorations and his 
military services in the Far West (see page 282), was nominated for 
president, with Dayton of New Jersey for vice president. 

442. Threats of Secession. The selection of both of the candi- 
dates from free states was in the eyes of the South a proof of the 
sectional character of the Republican party — the ''Black Repub- 
licans," as the Southerners called them on account of their interest 
in the negro. From all over the South came threats that Fremont's 
election would mean the end of the Union. "The Southern states," 
wrote Governor Wise of Virginia, "will not submit to a sectional 
election of a Free-Soiler or Black Republican. ... If Fremont is 
elected this Union will not last one year from November next. . . . 
The country was never in such danger." 

443. The Election of Buchanan. The Democrats too passed over 
their great leader, Stephen A. Douglas, and nominated James 
Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a dignified, formal, mediocre gentleman, 
who was especially " available " because he had been absent in England 
as minister during the Kansas struggle. The Democrats realized that 
the pacification of Kansas was the most important element of their 
success in the approaching election. Every fresh deed of violence 
reported from the territory was making thousands of Republican 
converts. Pierce sent out a new governor (the third in two years), 
Geary of Pennsylvania, with authority to use the United States 
troops to restore order. Geary drove the Missourian invaders out 
and stanched the wounds of bleeding Kansas (September, 1856). 
The election was saved for the Democrats. Buchanan carried all the 
slave states (except Maryland), besides New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 
Indiana, Illinois, and California. His electoral vote was 174 to 114 
for Fremont. Still the new Republican party, in its first presidential 
campaign, with a comparatively weak candidate at that, had made 
a remarkable fight. It had carried eleven states and polled 1,341,264 
votes to 1,838,169 for Buchanan. With an enthusiasm as great as 
that with which, in the summer's campaign, they had shouted, " Free 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 313 

speech, free press, free soil, Fre-mont and Victory ! " the Repub- 
licans now closed their ranks and entered on the next four years' 
campaign with the battle song of Whittier ringing in their ears : 

Then sound again the bugles, 

Call the muster-roll anew; 
If months have well-nigh won the field, 

What may not four years do ? 

444. The Political Situation in 1856. The whole conservative 
element of the country was relieved by the election of 1856. 
Buchanan was deemed a "safe" man, while the erratic, popular 
Fremont, urged by the abolitionists, might have precipitated a crisis. 
The country was at the flood tide of material prosperity. The na- 
tional debt, which stood at $68,000,000 in 1850, had been reduced to 
less than $30,000,000. The Walker tariff of 1846, though moderate, 
was bringing into the Treasury so large a surplus that a new tariff 
bill was passed without opposition in the last month of Pierce's 
term (February, 1857), reducing the rates to the lowest levels since 
the War of 1812. Buchanan declared in his inaugural address that 
he owed his election " to the inherent love for the Constitution and 
the Union which still animates the hearts of the American people " 
and expressed the hope that the long agitation on slavery was now 
"approaching its end." But before the echoes of the inaugural 
speech had died away, an event occurred which again roused the in- 
dignation of the antislavery men of the North and won thousands 
more to the conviction that the sections of our country could not 
dwell together in harmony until slavery was either, banished from our 
soil or extended to every part of the Union. This event was the 
Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court, delivered March 6, 1857. 

445. The Dred Scott Decision. Dred Scott, a negro slave belong- 
ing to a man in Missouri, had been taken by his master into free 
territory in the Northwest and brought back again to Missouri. 
Some years later he sued his master's widow for his freedom, on the 
ground that residence in a free territory had emancipated him. The 
case reached the highest court of Missouri, which denied that Scott 
was a " citizen," with the right to institute a suit. Meanwhile Scott 
had come into the possession of a New Yorker named Sandford and 
again sued for his freedom in the United States circuit court of 



314 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

IVIissouri.^ The federal court rendered the same decision as the state 
court, and Dred's patrons appealed the case to the Supreme Court of 
the United States. The Supreme Court decided that the federal 
court of Missouri had no jurisdiction in the case : the status of Dred 
Scott was fixed by the decision of the state court of Missouri. The 
matter should have ended there, but the Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court, Roger B. Taney of Maryland (who had been appointed by 
President Jackson on the death of John Marshall in 1835), went on 
to deliver a long opinion^ on the status of the negro. The negro was 
not a citizen, he declared, in the eyes of the Constitution of the 
United States. That Constitution was made for white men only. 
The blacks, at the time of its adoption, were regarded as " so far in- 
ferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to 
respect." Not being a citizen, the negro could not sue in a court 
of the United States. The slave was the property of his owner, and 
the national government was nowhere given power over the property 
of the inhabitants of the states of the Union. Furthermore, the 
Missouri Compromise of 1820 was declared unconstitutional. 

446. Importance of the Decision. The Southerners were jubi- 
lant. At last the extreme proslavery doctrine of Calhoun and Davis 
(note, p. 284) was recognized by the federal power at Washington, 
and by the most august branch of that power, the Supreme Court 
of the United States. "The nation has achieved a triumph ; sectional- 
ism has been rebuked and abolitionism has been staggered and 
stunned," said a Richmond paper. But the Northern press spoke 
of "sullied ermine" and "judicial robes polluted in the filth of pro- 
slavery politics." " The people of the United States," cried Seward, 
" never can and never will accept principles so abhorrent." Of course, 
the effect of the decision was greatly to strengthen the Republican 
party, which maintained that Congress had the power (as exercised 
in the Missouri Compromise bill) to exclude slavery from the terri- 
tories. The issue was clear cut now between the Republican doctrine 

1 When a citi2en of one state sues a citizen of another state, the case is tried in a federal, 
or United States, court. Of course the negro slave Dred Scott did not initiate this case 
himself. It was managed by antislavery men in Missouri who wished to test the position of 
the courts on the subject of slavery. 

2 An opinion expressed by a judge beyond what is called for in the actual case is called 
obiter dictum, a Latin phrase meaning literally " spoken by the way." It was improper for 
the court to render this most important part of its decision on a matter which was not 
before it at all. 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 315 

and the Dred Scott doctrine, leaving no middle ground for Douglas 
and his doctrine of popular sovereignty to stand upon. 

447. The Lecompton Constitution. Six months after the Dred 
Scott decision another crisis occurred in Kansas. A convention met 
at Lecompton, in September, 1857, to frame a constitution for the 
territory. The Free-Soil men refused to attend the convention, re- 
membering the frauds of. the earlier elections, but they were per- 
suaded by Governor Walker's good faith to take part in the elections 
for a territorial legislature in October and succeeded in returning a 
majority of Free-Soil members. When the proslavery convention in 
session at Lecompton saw that the Free-Soil men would control the 
legislature of the territory, they drew up a constitution in which the 
protection of all the existing slave property in Kansas was guaran- 
teed and then submitted to the vote of the people only the question 
of adopting this constitution with slavery or without slavery. Which- 
ever way the people voted there would be slavery in Kansas ; for 
a vote for the constitution " without slavery " simply meant that no 
more slaveholders would be admitted. The Free-Soil men denounced 
the fraud and demanded that the vote should be simply Yes or No 
on the whole Lecompton Constitution. They stayed away from the 
polls, and the proslavery people adopted the "constitution with 
slavery," casting in all 6226 votes (December 21, 1857). Two 
weeks later the Free-Soil legislature put the Lecompton Constitu- 
tion as a whole before the people and the Free-Soil citizens rejected 
it by a vote of over 10,000. It was clear enough that the majority 
of the inhabitants of Kansas did not want slavery. 

448. Douglas rebukes the Lecompton Fraud. When the Le- 
compton Constitution came before Congress, in December, 1857, 
Douglas immediately protested against the fraud as a violation of 
the principle of popular sovereignty, on which the territor\' was or- 
ganized. The people of Kansas, he insisted, must be allowed to 
vote fairly on the question of slavery or no slavery in the territory. 
A new convention must be called, and a new constitution submitted. 
But President Buchanan, in spite of the Free-Soil vote of 10,000 
against it, sent the Lecompton Constitution to Congress with the 
recommendation that Kansas be admitted as a state under its pro- 
visions. Douglas was firm. He defied the administration, rebuked 
President Buchanan to his face, and labored with might and main 



3i6 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

to defeat the bill. The South assailed him as a "traitor" and a 
"renegade" and a '^ Judas," — the very epithets with v/hich he had 
been branded in the North four years earlier. In spite of his efforts, 
the bill was passed by the Senate. The House, however, defeated 
the bill ; and when the Lecompton Constitution was submitted again j 
to the people of the territory, they again rejected it by the decisive 

vote of 1 1, GOO to 2000.^ 

449. Douglas and Lincoln Compared. Douglas's second term in 
the United States Senate was about to expire, and he returned to 
Illinois in the summer of 1858 to make the canvass for his reelection, 
in disgrace with the administration and in some private embarrass- 
ment.^ His Republican rival for the senatorship was Abraham Lin- 
coln. The two men had known each other for twenty years. They 
were both alike in being poor farmers' sons, who had come into the 
growing state of Illinois as 5^oung men and had engaged there in the 
practice of law. They were alike too in their intense ambition to make 
a name for themselves in politics. But here the resemblance ceased. 
While Douglas had been a national figure in the United States Senate 
for over a decade and twice a serious competitor for the Democratic 
presidential nomination, Lincoln's national honors had been limited 
to one inconspicuous term as a Whig member of Congress. In ap- 
pearance, temper, and character the two men were exact opposites : 
Lincoln very tall and lanky, awkward, reflective, and slow in speech 
and motion ; Douglas scarcely five feet in height, thickset, agile, 
volcanic in utterance, impetuous in gesture ; Lincoln undeviatingly 
honest in thought, making his speech always the servant of his 
reason ; Douglas, in his brilliancy of rhetoric, often confusing the 
moral principle for the sake of making the legal point. 

450. Lincoln's Position on Slavery. Somewhat disheartened by 
his lack of success, Lincoln was losing interest in politics, when the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise again roused him. In a speech 
at Peoria, Illinois, in October, 1854, he warned Douglas that his 
doctrine would '^ bring Yankees and Missourians into clash over 
slavery in Kansas" and with prophetic vision asked, "Will not the 
first drop of blood so shed be the knell of the Union ? " He joined 

1 In 1861 Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. 

2 A great part of Douglas's fortune had been swept away by a severe financial panic which 
came upon the country in 1S57, as the result of overconfidence in the prosperity of the early 
fifties and too sanguine investments in Western farms and railways. 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 317 

the new Republican party and soon rose to be its recognized leader 
in Illinois. When the Republican state convention nominated him 
for ihe senatorship in June, 1858, he addressed the delegates in a 
memorable speech : " In my opinion it [the slavery agitation] will 
not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ' A house 
divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government can- 
not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect 
the Union to be dissolved ; I do not expect the house to fall ; but I 
do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing 
or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the 
further spread of it ... or its advocates will push it forward till 
it shall become alike lawful in all the states." 

451. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Lincoln challenged Douglas 
to a series of debates before the people of Illinois on the respective 
merits of the Democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty in the ter- 
ritories and the Republican doctrine of the control of slavery in the 
territories by Congress. Douglas accepted, and seven remarkable 
debates took place in various parts of the state. The immediate 
object of the debates was to influence the people of the state in the 
election of the legislature which was to choose the United States 
senator. But the contest was not merely over a seat in the Senate. 
It was a great struggle watched with interest by the whole country. 
The point at issue was. Does the Constitution give Congress the right 
to exclude slavery from the territories ? 

452. The "Freeport Doctrine." The Dred Scott decision de- 
clared it unconstitutional for the national government to exclude 
slavery from the territories; but at the same time the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, with its doctrine of popular sovereignty, conferred 
on a ferritory the right to exclude slavery for itself. Douglas sup- 
ported both these positions. But, asked Lincoln in the debate at 
Freeport, how can a territory forbid slavery when Congress cannot ? 
The territory is the creation of Congress. Does it have more power 
than the Congress which creates it ? Can water rise above its source ? 
The question brought the answer Lincoln wanted. Douglas main- 
tained that legislation hostile to slavery by the people of the territory 
would make the territory free soil in spite of the Dred Scott decision. 
" It matters not," he said, " what way the Supreme Court may here- 
after decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may 



3i8 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

not go into a territory under the Constitution ; the people have the 
lawful means to introduce it or exclude it, as they please, for thei 
reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless- 
it is supported by local police regulations." This was the celebrated 
'^Freeport Doctrine."^ 

453. The Southern Radicals repudiate Douglas. Douglas worn 
the senatorship by the narrow margin of eight votes. But his ad- 
mission that the people of a territory might exclude slavery by 
'' hostile legislation" cost him the presidency two years later. The 
Southern radicals had reached the point where they demanded that 
Congress should interfere positively to protect slavery in the ter- 
ritories, even against the hostile legislation of the territory itself. 
'' Would you have Congress protect slaves any more than any other 
property in the territories ? " asked Douglas of Jefferson Davis. 
''Yes," replied Davis, ''because slaves are the only property the 
.North will try to take from us in the territories." "You will not 
carry a state north of the Ohio River on such a platform," cried 
Douglas. " And you could not get the vote of Mississippi on yours," 
answered Davis. The Democratic party was hopelessly divided. 
Douglas had railed at the "abolitionist" Republican party as "sec- 
tional." Now he and his followers were accused of the same fault 
by the Southern leaders. He woke finally to the realization that 
his efforts to hold the Northern and Southern wings of the Demo- 
cratic party together on the compromise doctrine of popular sov- 
ereignty were vain. Every concession to the slaveholders was only 
the basis of a new demand. Lincoln was right. The house was 
divided against itself. 

References • 

The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the Formation of thft 
Republican Party: T. C. ?>-^m:-K, Parties and Slavery (American Nation), chaps. 
vii, viii; Jesse Macy, The Anti-Slavery Crusade (Chronicles, Vol. XXVIII), 
chaps, x-xiii; W. E. Dodd, Expansion and Conflict (Riverside History), chap, 
xii; J. G. NicoLAY, Lije of Lincoln, chap, vii; Henry Wilson, Rise and Fall 
of the Slave Power, Vol. II, chaps, xxx, xxxi; J. B. McMaster, History of the 
People of the United States, Vol. VIII, chaps. Ixxxvi, Ixxxix, xc; J. F. Rhodes, 

^ Lincoln neatly paraphrased this "Freeport Doctrine " of Douglas in a speech at Colum- 
bus a year later : " Then a thing may be legally driven away from a place where it has a 
legal right to be." 



APPROACHING THE CRISIS 319 

History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. I, chap, v; 
Vol. II, chap, vii; J. W. Burgess, The Middle Period, chap, xix; A. B. JIart, 
American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 34, 35 ; Old South 
Leaflets, No. 82 ; William MacDonald, Select Documents of United States 
History, 1776-1861, Nos. 85-88; Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, 
chap. XX ; Allen Johnson, Stephen Arnold Douglas, chaps, xi-xiv. 

"A House divided against Itself": Smith, chaps, ix-xvii; McMaster, 
Vol. VIII, chaps, xci, xciii; Burgess, chaps, xx-xxii; Johnson, chaps, xv-xvii; 
Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 36-45; Old South Leaflets, Nos. 83-85; Macy, chaps, xx; 
Rhodes, Vol. II, chap, ix; Nicolay, chaps, viii, ix; Charles Robinson, The 
Kansas Conflict, chaps, v-xvii; Oswald G. Villard, John Brown, chaps, v-vii; 
J. T. Morse, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, chap, v; A. Rothschild, Lincoln, 
Master of Men, chap, iii; N. W. Stephenson, Abraham Lincoln and the Union 
(Chronicles, Vol. XXIX), chaps, i-iii; C. E. Merriam, American Political 
Theories, chap, vi; MacDonald, Nos. 91, 93; Samuel Tyler, Memoir of 
Roger B. Taney, chap. v. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Birth of the Republican Party: G. W. Julian, Personal Recol- 
lections, pp. 134-150; Stanwood, pp. 258-278; T. K. Lothrop, William H. 
Seward, pp. 142-161; Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 45-50, 177-185; A. C. McLaughlin, 
Lewis Cass, pp. 293-321; Francis Curtis, The Republican Party, Vol. I, pp. 
172-234; Johnson, pp. 260-280. 

2. Industrial Prosperity in the Fifties: Smith, pp. 59-74; E. L. Bogart, 
Economic History of the United States, pp. 206-215, 222-226, 238-249; D. R. 
Dewey, Financial History of the United States, pp. 248-274; C. D. Wright, 
Industrial Evolution of the United States, pp. 133-142 ; Edward Ingle, South- 
ern Sidelights, pp. 55-66, 88-94; W. G. Brown, The Lower South in American 
History, pp. 32-49; Rhodes, Vol. Ill, pp. 1-56; G. S. Callender, Readings 
in the Economic History of the United States, pp. 738-793. 

3. The Personal-Liberty Laws: Hart, Vol. IV, No. 33; Wilson, Vol. II, 
pp. 50-60; Marion G. MacDougall, Fugitive Slaves (Fay House Monographs) ; 
T. W. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, pp. 132-166; Nicolay and Hay, Abra- 
ham Lincoln, a History, Vol. Ill, pp. 17-34; J- J- Lalor, Cyclopaedia of 
Political Science, Vol. HI, pp. 162-163. 

4. Criticisms of the Dred Scott Decision: Hart, Vol. IV, No. 43; Tyler, 
PP- 373-400; Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 257-270; G. T. Curtis, Memoir of B. R. 
Curtis, Vol. I, pp. 211-251; J. G. Blaine, Tiventy Years of Congress, Vol. I, 
pp. 131-137; Macy, pp. 190-199; Lalor, Vol. I, pp. 838-841. 

5. Antislavery Poems: Lucy Larcom, Call to Kanzas (Hart, Vol. IV, 
No. 37); William Cltllen Bryant, The Prairies, The Call to Arms; James 
Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis, The Biglow Papers; John Greenleaf 
Whittier, Expostulation, The Farewell, Massachusetts to Virginia, The Kansas 
Emigrants, Burial of Barber, The Panorama, Brown of Ossawatomie. 



CHAPTER XV 
SECESSION 

The Election of Abraham Lincoln 

454. The Outlook in 1860. When the presidential year i860 
opened, the antislavery cause seemed to be defeated at every point. 
Congress, which in 1820 had excluded slavery from the larger part 
of the Western territory of the United States by the Missouri Com- 
promise, had by the Compromise of 1850 substituted the principle 
of noninterference with slavery in the territories, and by the Kansas- 
Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise outright. 
A stringent fugitive-slave law had been enacted by Congress (1850). 
The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, had declared that 
Congress had no power to exclude the property (that is, the slaves) 
of the citizens of any of the states from any territories of the Union 
(1857). Finally, the executive branch of the government, since the 
inauguration of Pierce, in 1853, had been conspicuously under the in- 
fluence of Jefferson Davis and the other radical proslavery leaders. 

455. Slavery fixed on the South. In the Southern states 
the institution of slavery seemed fixed beyond any power to dis- 
turb it. The slaves had increased from 2,000,000 in 1820 to nearly 
4,000,000 in i860 ; yet the constantly increasing demand for cotton 
in the mills of England and the North made the supply of slaves 
inadequate. The same quality of negro that sold for $400 in 1820 
brought $1200 to $1500 in i860. Why pay $1500 apiece in Vir- 
ginia for slaves that could be bought for $600 in Cuba and for less 
than $100 in Africa ? said the Mississippi planter. A convention 
of the cotton-raising states at Vicksburg, in May, 1859, passed a 
resolution that "all laws, state or federal, prohibiting the African 
slave trade ought to be repealed." Cargoes of slaves were landed 
at Southern ports in almost open defiance of the law of 1807 pro- 
hibiting the foreign slave trade.^ 

' In 1859 the yacht Wanderer landed 300 slaves, brought direct from the African coast 
at Brunswick, Georgia. They were distributed as far as Memphis, Tennessee. The owner 

320 



SECESSION 



321 



456. John Brown's Raid. John Brown, whose fanatical deed 
of murder in Kansas we have already described (p. 310), felt that 
he was commissioned by God to free the slaves in the South. He con- 
ceived the wild plan of posting in the fastnesses of the Appalachian 
]\Iountains small bodies of armed men, who should make descents 
into the plains, seize negroes, and conduct them back to his "camps 










THE MARINES STORM THE ARSENAL AT HARPER S FERRY 



of freedom." He made a beginning at the littl'e Virginia town of 
Harpers Ferry, at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah 
Rivers, where with only eighteen men he seized the United States 
arsenal and, raiding the houses of a few of the neighboring planters, 
forcibly freed about thirty of their slaves. They v/ere huddled 

and the captain of the vessel were indicted on a charge of breaking the federal law of 1S07, 
but no Southern juiy could be found to convict them, and they went free. Douglas said that 
15,000 slaves were imported in the last years of the decade 1850-1S60. What a contrast to 
the attitude of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his presidential message of December, 1S06, 
" I congratulate you, fellow citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may [prohibit] 
all further violations of human rights, which have so long been continued on the unoffending 
inhabitant of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests oi our 
country have long been eager to proscribe,'' 



722 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



Cl 



together with his men in the arsenal, rather bewildered, and more like 
captives than newly baptized freemen, when a detachment of United 
States marines (under the command of Robert E. Lee) arrived on the 
scene, battered down the doors of the arsenal, and easily made cap- 
tives of Brown's band (October i8, 1859). Brown, severely wounded, 
was tried for treason by the laws of Virginia. He pleaded only his 
divine commission in his defense and was speedily condemned and 
hanged. When Brown was hailed as a martyr by many antislavery 
men in the North, who were jubilant to see a blow struck for free- 
dom, even if it were a murderous blow,^ thousands in the South 
were persuaded that the '^ Black Republicans " were determined to 
let loose upon their wives and children the horrors of negro massacre. 

457. The Davis Resolutions. Early in February, i860, Jefferson 
Davis brought into the Senate a set of resolutions containing the 
demands of the South. Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty 
was entirely repudiated. Congress must protect slavery in every 
part of the territory of the United States. The Northern states must 
repeal their Personal-Liberty laws and cease to interfere with the 
thoroughgoing execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850. The 
Dred Scott decision must be respected. These extreme proslavery 
resolutions, which demanded everything but the actual introduction 
of slavery into the free states of the North, were intended as a plat- 
form for the Democratic party in the approaching convention for 
the choice of a presidential candidate. 

458. Lincoln's Cooper Union Speech. At the close of the same 
month of February, i860, Abraham Lincoln, at the invitation of the 
Republicans of the Eastern states, delivered a notable speech in the 
hall of the Cooper Union, New York City. Since the debates with 
Douglas in 1858 Lincoln had been recognized in the West as the 
leading man of the Republican party, but before the Cooper Union 
speech the East did not accord him a place beside Seward and 
Sumner. His clothes were ill-fitting, his voice was high and thin, 
his gestures were awkward as he stood before the cultured audience 

1 The tense feeling in the North led many men of note to indorse John Brown's deed in 
words of extravagant praise. Theodore Parker declared that his chances for earthly immor- 
tality were double those of any other man of the century, and Ralph Waldo Emerson even 
compared the hanging of John Brown with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The funds and 
firearms for Brown's expedition of course came from the North, but the men who contributed 
them (with perhaps one or two exceptions) thought they were to be used in Kansas and not 
for a raid in the state of Virginia. John Brown's deed at Harpers Ferry, like his deed at the 
Pottawatomie, deserves only condemnation. 



SECESSION 323 

of New York ; but all these things were forgotten as he proceeded 
with accurate historical knowledge, keen argument, lucid exposition, 
and great charity to expound the position of the Republican party 
on the issue of slavery. He showed that a majority of the signers 
of the Declaration of Independence had voted for the restriction of 
slavery ; that Congress had repeatedly legislated to control slavery 
in the territories of the United States, and that the South had ac- 
cepted and even voted for the laws ; that no particle of proof could 
be adduced to show that the Republican party or any member of 
it had anything to do with John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry ; 
that the talk of the Southerners about the disasters which the elec- 
tion of a Republican president would bring upon them was the 
product of their own imagination ; and that the threats of the South 
to break up the Union in case of such an election were simply the 
argument of the highway robber. He concluded by a ringing appeal 
to the men of the North to stand by their principles in the belief 
that right makes might. The speech served as a reply to Davis's 
resolutions and made Lincoln a serious candidate for the Republican 
nomination for president. 

459. The Split in the Democratic Party. The great conventions 
of i860, which were to nominate candidates for the most important 
presidential election in our history, began with the meeting of the 
Democratic delegates at Charleston, South Carolina, April 23. There 
was a struggle between the Douglas men and the supporters of the 
Davis resolutions. The Douglas platform won by a margin of about 
thirty votes, whereupon the Alabama delegation, led by William L. 
Yancey (for ten years an ardent advocate of secession), marched out 
of the hall, followed by the delegates of five other cotton states. 
These " bolters " later met at Richmond and nominated John C. 
Breckinridge of Kentucky for the presidency, while the "regular" 
Democrats, reassembling at Baltimore, nominated Douglas. Thus 
the extreme proslavery men of the South deliberately split the Demo- 
cratic party and made probable the election of the Republican candi- 
date. It was the defiant deed of men who were determined to listen 
to no further discussion of their demands for the full protection of 
slavery by the national government. Alexander Stephens of Georgia, 
perhaps the ablest statesman of the South, said that within a twelve- 
month of the disruption of the Democratic convention at Charleston 
the nation would be engaged in a bloody civil war. And so it was. 



324 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

460. The Republican Convention at Chicago. Meanwhile the 
Republican convention had met at Chicago (May i6) in a huge 
structure called the Wigwam. Ten thousand people packed the 
building, while outside tens of thousands more were breathlessly 
waiting in hopes to hear that the. favorite son of the West, '^honest 
Abe " Lincoln, the " rail-splitter," had been chosen to lead the party 
to victory. The delegates adopted a platform asserting the right 
and duty of Congress to prohibit the further spread of slavery into 
the territories of the United States. They condemned Buchanan's 
administration for its encouragement of the Lecompton fraud, de- 
manded the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state, and 
denounced the opinion of Taney in the Dred Scott case. 

461. The Nomination of Abraham Lincoln. When the conven- 
tion met, Senator Seward of New York was considered the leading' 
candidate for the Republican nomination, which he himself con- 
fidently expected. Other aspirants for the honor were Chase of Ohio, 
Bates of Missouri, Cameron of Pennsylvania, Smith of Indiana, and 
Lincoln of Illinois. Seward led on the first ballot, but he could not 
command the 233 votes necessary for nomination. He was suspected 
in some states of being intimately allied with the abolitionists, and 
in others of being too closely connected with the political machine 
in New York State. His vote remained nearly stationary, while 
delegation after delegation went over to Lincoln. On the third ballot 
Lincoln was nominated and the convention went wild. Pandemonium 
reigned within the hall, while cannon boomed without. Men shouted 
and danced and marched and sang. They hugged and kissed each 
other, they wept, they fainted for joy. Seward, although his friends 
were stunned with disappointment, showed his nobility of character 
and his devotion to the Republican cause by an instant and hearty 
support of Abraham Lincoln.^ 

462. The Constitutional Union Party. There was a fourth ticket 
in the field, headed by John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett 
of Massachusetts, supported by the old Whigs and Union men in 
the South, especially in the border states. Their platform ignored 

1 Seward's disappointment is expressed in a letter to his wife, written May 30, i860, " I 
am a leader deposed by my own party in the hour of organization for decisive battle." 
Lincoln recognized Seward's valuable support and great gifts when he bestowed on him the 
office of Secretary of State. The other aspirants for the nomination. Chase. Smith, Bates,; 
and Cameron, also received places in Lincoln's first cabinet 



SECESSION 



325 



MERGURT 



EXTRA: 



the subject of slavery, simply declaring ''for the maintenance of 
the Union and the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws." 
463. Lincoln's Election. In the election on the sixth of Novem- 
ber Lincoln carried all the Northern states except New Jersey, 
receiving 180 electoral votes. Douglas got only 12 electoral votes, 
from Missouri and New Jersey. 

Bell carried Kentucky, Tennessee, CHARLESTdll 

and Virginia, with 39 votes. And 
Breckinridge got the 72 votes of 
the rest of the Southern states. But 
the electoral vote does not tell the 
story of the election. Douglas 
polled a very large popular vote 
in all the states of the North (see 
map). He received 1,370,000 votes 
to Lincoln's 1,860,000 and would 
have easily won with the support of 
the united Democratic party. He 
was repudiated by the administra- 
tion of Buchanan and by the radical 
slavery leaders of the South, yet he 
received nearly twice as many votes 
(1,370,000 to 850,000) as their 
candidate, Breckinridge, It was 
a wonderful testimony to his per- 
sonal and political hold on his 
countrymen. Again, although Lin- 
coln received 180 electoral votes to 
123 for Douglas, Bell, and Breckin- 
ridge combined, his popular vote 
was only 1,860,000 as against 

2,810,000 cast for his opponents.^ He was the choice of exactly 40 
per cent of the voters of the country. Finally, the election showed 
that the South as a whole was not in favor of secession in i860. 



SVtWKl. tmmbnoutly at LIA o'riack, P. .tf. JOtttmbtf 
!tO(A, I860. 

AJ« OBOLNAMCB 

9b dUtotst I/a OiAin ttliteen Its Stat* 9f Soulh Carnttna ant 
othtt Stottt uuifrii idf A tar mndtr f A« eotnpacl tnlUled ** Th* 
CeuelitulUM tif tile ViUtt^ Slatei of .laurica." 

Tbu [tu CMJdum kdopud bj Ai iB C««*4Dllao, ca <lia wuI;4Uj4 ixj of jlaf, [a Hi. 
fmof eio Lcrd oo. thouta'tMTeB bundred tol.lgbtj'-.lgbl, .htrebj ibfi CouiiituUoa of (fa* 
Cdlea St.1.* of Aacric vu mUod, tai .Iso, U] &cu wid pun er icu of ibo OoD«nl> 
iJMnbl/. of tblf Sute, niif/loj uieiidfflaDU of tbo e.ld CoaitlUUlou. kn beccbj npoilcd i 
ud (bitibt ODloa do. wiloljUog bumjn SoQti CmUs. tad olbw 6UW^ oodot (to bae of 
*fba (Tolled suuol Ajsoild^' li bmbj dlaoMl 



THIB 



UNION 



t& 



DISSOLVEDl 

FACSIMILE OF THE ORDINANCE 
OF SECESSION 



1 The electoral system of choice of president may fail to show the popular choice. The 
candidate who receives most votes (a plurality) in any state gets all the electoral votes of that 
state, though his opponents combined may poll more than double his vote, as Lincoln's 

opponents did m CaJifomia ajJiS Oregon.. 



326 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNIOK 



!^^^ 



For Douglas ahd Sell, both stanch Union men, polled 115,000 votes 
more than Breckinridge in the slave states. 

464. The Secession of South Carolina. When the legislature of 
South Carolina, which had met to choose the presidential electors 
for the state,^ got the news of Lincoln's election, it immediately 

called a convention to carry 
out its threat of secession. On 
the twentieth of December the 
convention met at Charleston 
and carried, by the unanimous 
vote of its 169 members, the 
resolution that ^' the Union now * 
subsisting between South Caro- 
lina and the other states, under 
the name of the United States of 
America, is hereby dissolved." 
The ordinance of secession 
was met with demonstrations 
of joy by the people of South 
Carolina. The city of Charles- 
ton was decked with the pal- 
metto flag of the state. Salvos 
of artillery were fired, houses 
were draped with blue bunting, 
and the bells were rung in a 
hundred churches. The ancient 
commonwealth of South Carolina, after many threats and warnings, 
had at last "resumed" its position as a free and independent state. 

The Southern Confederacy 

465. The Southern Confederacy. Within six weeks after the 
secession of South Carolina the states of Mississippi, Florida, Ala- 
bama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas had severed their connection 
with the Union. Delegates from six of these seven " sovereign states " 

1 South Carolina was the only state in i860 that continued the custom, common in the early 
days of our history to most of the states, of choosing presidential electors by vote of the 
legislature. In all the other states they had come to be chosen by vote of the people. 




T K E R jj I M S ■ 



SECESSION BANNER 

Displayed in the South Carolina 
Convention 




-^ 



-ii 



^ 



^ 



ys 



Electoral Popular 
Vote Vote 



In Free In Slave 
States States 



^ 
Mi0 



Lincoln 180 1,866.452 1,840.022 26.430 

Breckinridge 72 849.781 279.723 570.053 

Bell 39 588,879 72,906 515,973 

Douglas 12 1.376.957 1,212,432 164,525 



Circles in each state show vote of candidate 
receiving largest minority 

Numbers in parenthesia in each state show 
electoral vote 




The Presider lit 




I Election of iS6o 



SECESSION 



327 



met at Montgomery, Alabama, Februan- 4, 1861, and organized a 
new Confederacy. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was chosen presi- 
dent, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia xice president. A 
constitution was drawn up and submitted to the several states of 
the Confederacy for ratification. This constitution was very similar 
to the Constitution of the United States, except that slaver\' was ex- 
pressly sanctioned, Congress was forbidden to levy protective duties, 
the president was elected for a term of six years without eligibility 
for reelection, and the members of 
the cabinet were given the right 
to speak on the floor of Congress.^ 
A Confederate flag, the " stars and 
bars," was adopted. A tax of one 
eighth of a cent a pound on ex- 
ported cotton was levied. Presi- 
dent Davis was authorized to raise 
an army of 100,000 men and se- 
cure a loan of $15,000,000, and a 
committee of three, with the impet- 
uous Yancey of Alabama as chair- 
man, was sent abroad to secure the 
friendship and alliance of European 
courts. Both Davis and Stephens 
believed that the South would have 
to fight ''a long and bloody war" 
to establish its independence. 

466. Lincoln's Election no Cause for Secession. The Southern 
leaders spoke much of the "tyranny" of the North and compared 
themselves to the Revolutionary' fathers of 1776, who wrested their 
independence from Great Britain. But the simple facts of the case 
warranted no such language. A perfectly fair election in November 
had resulted in the choice of a Republican for president. Abraham 
Lincoln, although he believed that slavery must ultimatel}^ disappear 
from the United States, had given repeated assurances to the men 
of the South that he would not disturb the institution in their states 

^ The Confederate constitution is printed in parallel columns with the Constitution of the 
United States in Wilson's " Histon' of the American People," Vol. IV, Appendix. Of course, 
the Confederate constitution never had a chance to go into fair operation, as the Southern Con- 
federacy was overthrown in the great Ci\il War, which followed immediately upon its adoption 




JEFFERSON DAVIS 



328 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



and that he was even in favor of the execution of the Fugitive-Slave 
Law of .1850, the violation of which by the Personal-Liberty acts 
of the Northern states was the one real grievance of the South. 
Southern statesmen all knew that Abraham Lincoln's plighted word 
was good.^ Besides, as Stephens pointed out in the speech by which 
he endeavored to restrain Georgia from secession, the Republicans 
were in the minority in both branches of Congress, and the President, 
even if inclined to " invade the rights of the South," could do nothing 

without the support of Congress, 

467. Buchanan's Weakness. The 
conduct of President Buchanan cer- 
tainly was anything but "tyrannical." 
In his annual message of December 4, 
i860, when it was almost certain that 
South Carolina would secede, he de- 
clared that no state had a right to 
leave the Union. Yet at the same 
time he gave the secessionists comfort 
by adding that the government of the 
United States had no legal means of 
compelling a state to remain in the 
Union. He made no attempt to re- 
strain the seceding states when they 
seized the property of the United 
States within their borders (public buildings, forts, arsenals, arms, 
money) for the use of the Confederacy. He was so anxious to 
avert war, or at least to ward it off until he should have sur- 
rendered the reins of government into the hands of Abraham 
Lincoln on the fourth of March, 1861, that he lost the respect 
even of the secessionists. They called him an imbecile and boasted 
of "tying his hands," Had it not been for the presence in the 

1 Lincoln asked the senators from the cotton states to advise their people to wait before 
seceding until " some act deemed violative of their rights was done by the incoming admin- 
istration." To his friend, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, he wrote (December 22, 1S60) : 
" Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would 
directly or indirectly interfere with their slaves . . . ? If they do, I wish to assure you . . . 
that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect 
than it was in the days of Washington." It was a grave fault in Stephens that he did not 
publish this letter until after Lincoln's assassination, though even this assurance would 
probably not have held the Southern states back from secession. 




THE STARS AND BASS 



SECESSION 329 

cabinet of a trio of stanch Unionists (Black, Holt, and Stanton), 
President Buchanan probably would have yielded to the demands 
of a commission sent to Washington by South Carolina and recog- , i 
nized that state as independent and '^ sovereign." ^ 

468. The Crittenden Amendments. The behavior of the Con- 
gress which sat in the winter of 1 860-1 861 gave the South as little 
provocation for secession as did the words of Lincoln or the deeds | 
of Buchanan. Instead of preparing for war. Congress bent its whole ^ 

\ effort to devising a plan of compromise which should keep the Union 
intact. The venerable Senator J. J, Crittenden of Kentucky, the 
successor of Henry Clay, proposed a series of '^ unamendable amend- 
ments" to the Constitution (December 18, i860), restoring the 
Missouri-Compromise line of 36° 30' as the boundary between slave 
territory and free territory, pledging the United States government 
to pay Southern owners for all runaway slaves they lost through non- 
enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law in the free states, and for- 
bidding Congress ever to interfere with the domestic slave trade or 
with slavery in the states where it was established by law.- A select 
committee of thirteen in the Senate, including the leaders of public 
opinion in the North and the South (Seward, Douglas, and Davis), 
was appointed to consider the Crittenden amendments. At the 
same time a committee of thirty-three in the House was chosen 
to work also at the problem of reconciliation. 

b 469. Why Compromise failed. But the committees accom- 
plished nothing. The Republican members refused to accept the 
line 36° 30' or any other line dividing slaveholding territories from 
free territories. Their platform called for the prohibition by Con- 
gress of slavery in all the territories of the United States ; and their 
position was supported by President-elect Lincoln, who wrote to Mr. 
Kellogg, the Illinois member of the House committee, "Entertain 
no proposition for the extension of slavery." On the other side, it 
was precisely the unrestricted extension of slavery in the territories, 
and its unqualified recognition by the government, for which the 

1 The men of the North who remembered the days of 1832 were crying, " O for one hour 
of Andrew Jackson ! " Strangely enough, it was to Buchanan himself (then minister to 
Russia) that Jackson sent the message, in 1832, " I have met nullification at the threshold." 

- This last provision was actually passed in the form of an amendment to the Constitution 
by the necessary two-thirds vote in each House (February 28, 186 1). But it was then too 
late for compromise. Only two states ratified the proposed amendment. 



330 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

South was contending. The '' tyranny " which drove the seven cotton i 
states into secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln on a plat- 
form which declared that the spread of slavery must stop, — that 
slavery was sectional and freedom national, James Russell Lowell 
summed the whole matter up in a single sentence, when he wrote in 
the January (1861) number of the Atlantic Monthly, '^The crime of 
the North is the census of i860." Steadily and rapidly the North 
had been growing in numbers and in the sentiment of freedom during 
the decades 1 840-1 860, until it contained enough liberty men to 
elect a president on a Free-Soil platform.^ 

470. Slavery the Cause of the Civil War. Both Davis and 
Stephens in their accounts of the Southern Confederacy, written after 
the Civil War, asserted that not slavery but the denial to the 
South of her rights under the Constitution was the cause of secession 
and of the war which followed. But the only "right" for which the 
South was contending in i860 was the right to have the institution 
of slavery recognized and protected in all the territory of the United 
States. Whether or not the Constitution gave the South this right 
was exactly the point of dispute. It was not a case of the North's 
refusing to give the South its constitutional right but of the North's 
denying that such ivas the constitutional right of the South. It was 
a conflict in the interpretation of the Constitution ; and slavery alone 
was the cause of that conflict. 

471. The Right of the South to Secede. Whether or not the 
Southern states had a right to secede from the Union and form a 
new Confederacy, for the cause of slavery or anything else, is an- 
other question. A people must always be its own judge of whether 
its grievances at any moment are sufficient to justify revolt from the 
government which it has heretofore acknowledged. Our Revolu- 
tionary forefathers exercised that right of judgment when they re- 
volted from the British crown. If a revolt is successful, it is called 
a, revolution and marks the birth of a new civil society or state. 

1 The following table shows the increase of the Liberty, Free-Soil, and Republican vote 
between the years 1840 and i860 : , 

1S40 James G. Bimey received 7000 votes 

1844 James G. Bimey received 62,000 votes 

1845 Martin Van Buren received 290,000 votes 
1852 John P. Hale received 156,000 votes 
1856 John C. Fremont received 1,340,000 votes 
i860 Abraham Lincoln received 1,860,000 votes 



SECESSION 331 

There is no written law that can forbid the " sacred right of revo- 
kition," because revolution comes from the people, who are the 
rightful makers of the law. We may believe, as many men of the 
South do believe today, that the causes of the revolt of the Southern 
states in 1861 were not sufficient to justify secession and war ; but 
the right to revolt, if the South thought it had just cause, is beyond 
argument. 

472. Conduct of the Southern Leaders at Washington^ A num- 
ber of Southerners remained at Washington, in Congress or in exec- 
utive positions, long after they had become hostile to the national 
government. Two members of the cabinet, Floyd of Virginia and 
Thompson of Mississippi, used their high positions to encourage 
disunion. The senators from six of the cotton states met in a com- 
mittee room of the Senate, January 5, 1861, and advised their states 
to secede immediately. Even then these senators did not resign their 
seats, but waited until they heard that their states had actually 
passed secession ordinances. This conduct of the Southern states- 
men was resented in the North as a violation of their oath to support 
the Constitution of the United States. 

The Fall of Fort Sumter 

473. Lincoln faces a Crisis. It was a serious condition of affairs 
that confronted Abraham Lincoln when he was sworn into the office 
of president on March 4, 1861. A rival government in the South 
had been in operation for a full month. All the military property, 
except one or two forts, in the seven states which composed the 
Southern Confederacy had been seized by the secessionist govern- 
ment. From Congress and the executive departments at Washington^ 
from federal offices all through the North, and from army and navy 
posts, Southern men were departing daily in order to join the for- 
tunes of their states. Many voices in the North were bidding them 
farewell and godspeed. And, most serious of all, brave Major Robert 
Anderson, with a little garrison of 83 men in Fort Sumter in Charles- 
ton harbor, was writing to the War Department that his stores of 
flour and bacon were almost exhausted. 

474. The Inaugural Address. Lincoln's inaugural address was 
a reassertion of his kindly feeling toward the South and a plea for 



b 



332 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

calm deliberation before any acts of violence. The new President 
declared his purpose of holding the forts and property belonging to 
the government of the United States and of collecting the duties and 
imposts. But beyond what was necessary to execute the laws ac- 
cording to his oath of office, he disclaimed any intention of using 
force or of "invading" the South. He appealed to the common 
memories of the North and the South, which, like '^ mystic cords, 
stretched from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living 
heart . . . over this broad land." Turning to the South he said : 
" In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine 
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail 
you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggres- 
sors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern- 
ment, while / shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, 
and defend it."^ 

475. The Situation in Charleston Harbor. A few days after his 
inauguration President Lincoln called the members of his cabinet^ 
together, and laid before them the critical situation at Charleston. 
In the previous December Buchanan had promised the representa- 
tives of South Carolina in Congress not to make any move to pro- 
vision or reenforce the forts in Charleston harbor so long as the state 
refrained from attacking them. The next month, however, Buchanan 
had been spurred by the Unionists in his cabinet to send the trans- 
port Star of the West with provisions for Major Anderson's garrison 
in Fort Sumter. The guns of Morris Island opened fire on the 
transport and compelled her to turn back (January 9, 1861). In 
spite of this attack upon the flag, Buchanan parleyed and excused, 
praying for the arrival of the day which should release him from the 
responsibilities of his high office. That day had now arrived. But 
meanwhile the South Carolinians had strengthened the batteries 
that bore upon Fort Sumter, until Major Anderson reported that 
reenforcements of 20,000 men would be necessary to maintain his 
position. 

1 The entire inaugural address should be read by every student. It is one of the finest 
state papers in our history. It can be found in full in Nicolay and Hay's "Abraham Lincoln, a 
History," Vol. Ill, p 327. 

2 The cabinet was composed of the following men : State, William H. Seward ; Treasury, 
Salmon P. Chase ; War, Simon Cameron ; Navy, Gideon Welles ; Interior, Caleb Smith ; 
Attorney-General, Edwin Bates ; Postmaster-General, Montgomery Blair. Edwin M. Stanton 
succeeded Cameron in the War Department early in 1862. 




From the bust by Louis M?.yer (Copyriplit, 1916) 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



SECESSION 



333 



476. Lincoln determines to provision Fort Sumter. It was a 
critical moment. To send reenforcements to Major Anderson would 
probably precipitate war. There was a widespread feeling in the 
North that if the Southern states wished to secede in peace, they 
should be allowed to do so. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York 
Tribune, next to Lincoln and Seward the most influential man in 
the Republican party, wrote : " If the cotton states shall decide 
that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on 
letting them go in 
peace. . . . We hope 
never to live in a re- 
public whereof one sec- 
tion is pinned to the 
residue by bayonets." 
Lincoln himself hated 
the thought of war, 
but his oath of office 
would not allow him 
to parley with dis- 
union. On the eighth 
of April, therefore, 
he notified Governor 
Pickens of South Caro- 
lina that an attempt 
would be made to 
supply Fort Sumter 

with provisions, but that no men or ammunition would be thrown 
into the fort except in case of resistance on the part of the state. 

477. The Bombardment of Fort Sumter. When the Confederate 
government at Montgomery heard of Lincoln's intentions, it ordered 
General Beauregard, who was in command of some 7000 troops at 
Charleston, to demand the immediate surrender of the fort. Major 
Anderson refused to abandon his post, and General Beauregard, fol- 
lowing orders from Montgomery, made ready to reduce Fort Sumter 
by cannon. Before dawn, on the twelfth of April, 1861, a shell 
rose from the mortars of Fort Johnson and, screaming over the 
harbor, burst just above the fort. It was the signal for a general 
bombardment. In a few minutes, from the batteries of Sullivan's, 




i!|Star ofthe West 
Battery 



CHARLESTON HARBOR 

Showing Fort Sumter and the battery which fired 
on the Star of the West 



334 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

Morris, and James Islands, east and south and west, fifty cannons 
were pouring shot and shell upon Fort Sumter. Anderson stood the 
terrific bombardment for two whole days, 'Cvhile Northern steamers 
lay rolling in the heavy weather outside the bar, unable to come 
to his relief. Finally, when the fort had been battered to ruins and 
was afire from red-hot shot, Anderson surrendered, saluting the tat- 
tered flag as he marched his half-suffocated garrison to the boats. 

478. Lincoln's Call for Troops. The bombardment of Fort 
Sumter opened the Civil War. The day after the surrender of the 
fort (April 15) Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring that the laws 
of the United States were opposed in the states of South Carolina, 
Georgia, Alabama, Florida, IMississippi, Louisiana, and Texas ''by 
combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course 
of judicial proceeding" and called on the states of the Union for 
75,000 troops of their militia ''to suppress the said combinations." 
At the same time he ordered all persons concerned in this uprising 
against the government to disperse within twenty days and sum- 
moned Congress to assemble in extra session on the fourth of July. 

479. The Effect of the Fall of Fort Sumter. The fall of Fort 
Sumter and the President's proclamation meant the instantaneous 
crystallization of feeling both North and South. In the North men 
forgot party lines and political animosities. Douglas, the leader of 
a million and a half Democrats, hastened to the White House to 
grasp Lincoln's hand and pledge him his utmost support in defending 
the Union. Ex-Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, hitherto ruled by 
Southern sympathies, came over to the Union cause. Editors like 
Horace Greeley, preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, statesmen like 
Edward Everett, who had lately found the idea of forcing the 
Southern states to remain in the Union abhorrent, now joined in 
the call to arms. One thing only filled men's thoughts, — the Amer- 
ican flag had been fired on by order of the secessionist govern- 
ment at Montgomery. The South was rejoicing over the fall of Fort 
Sumter. Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, predicted that 
by the first of May the Confederate flag would float over the dome 
of the Capitol at Washington. Lincoln's call for troops, which to 
the North meant the preservation of the Union, was looked on by 
the South as a wicked threat to invade the sacred soil of sovereign 
states and subjugate a peaceful people who asked only "to be let 



SECESSION 



335 



alone," to live under their own institutions. The Confederate Con- 
gress met " Mr. Lincoln's declaration of war on the South " by raising 
an army of 100,000 men and securing a loan of $50,000,000. 

480. The Confederacy Enlarged. There were eight slaveholding 
states which had not joined the Southern Confederacy before the 
attack on Fort Sumter. Lincoln's call for troops drove four of these 




HOW THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY WAS ENLARGED AFTER THE FALL OF 

FORT SUMTER 



States (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee) into 
the Confederacy ; while Kentucky and Missouri, whose governors 
also had refused to furnish their militia for the purpose of " subjugat- 
ing their sister states of the South," were kept in the Union only 
with great difficulty. In Missouri it actually came to civil war, the 
Unionist troops of Captain Lyon driving the supporters of Governor 
Jackson (secessionist) out of the capitaL 



336 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

481. General Robert E. Lee. The secession of Virginia two days 
after Lincoln's call for troops was an event of prime importance. It 
gave the South her greatest general, Robert E. Lee. General Lee 
was the son of a distinguished Revolutionary general, belonging to 
one of the first families of Virginia, and was himself a gentleman of 
spotless purity of character, — noble, generous, sincere, brave, and 
gifted. He had already been selected by President Lincoln to com- 
mand the Union army, but he felt that he could not draw his sword 
against his native state. After an agonizing mental struggle he 
resigned his commission in the United States army and offered his 
services to his state. He became commander of the Virginia troops 
and, in May, 1862, general of the Confederate army in Virginia, 
which he led with wonderful skill and devotion through the remainder 
of the Civil War.^ 

482. The Street Battle in Baltimore. The secession of Virginia 
also brought the boundaries of the Confederacy up to the Potomac 
River and planted the ''stars and bars" where they could be seen 
from the windows of the Capitol at Washington. The city was al- 
most defenseless. There were rumors that Beauregard's troops were 
coming from Charleston to attack it. The troops of the North, in 
responding to Lincoln's call, had to cross the state of Maryland to 
reach the capital. Maryland was a slave state and her sympathy 
with the ''sister states of the South" was strong. Baltimore was 
full of secessionists. While the Sixth Massachusetts regiment was 
crossing the city it was attacked by a mob and had to fight its way 
to the Washington station in a bloody street battle (April 19). The 
first blood of the Civil War was shed on the anniversary of the 
battle of Lexington. 

483. Washington relieved from Danger. President Lincoln was 
in great distress for the safety of the capital.^ In a panic, men 
were leaving Washington by hundreds, fleeing as from a . doomed 
city. Governor Hicks of Maryland, swept along by the secessionist 

1 It was not till near the close of the war (1865) that President Davis, who never very 
cordially recognized Lee's greatness, was forced by public opinion to make him general in 
chief of the Confederate forces in the field. 

2 Nicolay and Hay (Vol. IV, p. 152) tell how President Lincoln paced the floor of his 
office in the White House for hours on the twenty-third of April, gazing out of the windows 
that looked down the Potomac, where he expected any moment to see the Confederate gun- 
boats appear, and calling out audibly, in his anxiety, for the Union troops to hasten to the 
relief of the city. 



SECESSION SSI 

sentiment at Baltimore, telegraphed President Lincoln, begging him 
to send no more troops through the city (April 22), and mobs tore 
up railroads and destroyed bridges. The telegraph wires were cut 
and the government was shut off from communication with the loyal 
states, while the officials and citizens of the capital were in a panic 
lest Beauregard should appear on the southern bank of the Potomac 
with his victorious troops from Charleston. But plucky regiments 
from Massachusetts and New York (''the dandy Seventh") reached 
Annapolis by the waters of Chesapeake Bay, and relaying the track 
and rebuilding the bridges as they marched, came into the city of 
Washington on the twenty-fifth of April. As they marched up 
Pennsylvania Avenue, with colors flying and bands playing, the 
anxious gloom which had lain on the city since the fall of Fort 
Sumter was changed to rejoicing. The national capital was safe. 

References 

The Election of Abraham Lincoln: Edward Stanwood, History of the 
Presidency, chap, xxi; F. E. Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War (American 
Nation), chaps, i-ix; Nicolay and Hay, Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. VI; 
Allen Johnson, Stephen Arnold Douglas, chap, xviii; William MacDonald, 
Select Documents of United States History, 1776-1861, No. 94; J. F. Rhodes, 
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. II, chaps, x, 
xi; Vol. Ill, chap, xiil; J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United 
States, Vol. VIII, chap, xcvi; N. W. Stephenson, Abraham Lincoln and the 
■Union (Chronicles, Vol. XXIX), chaps, iv, v; A. B. Hart, Contemporaries, 
Vol. IV, Nos. 49-61 ; J. W. Burgess, The Civil War and the Constitution, Vol. I, 
-chaps, iii, iv. 

The Southern Confederacy: Rhodes, Vol. Ill, chap, xiv; MacDonald, 
l^os. 95-97; Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 62-69; Burgess, Vol. I, chaps, iv-vi; Chadwick, 
chaps, ix-xi; Horace Greeley, The American Conflict, Vol. I, chaps, xxvi, 
3xvii; J. S. Wise, The End of an Era, chaps, x, xi; Nicolay and Hay, Abra- 
ham Lincoln, a History, Vol. Ill, chap, i; Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of 
■the Confederacy, Vol. I, part iii; G. T. Curtis, James Buchanan, Vol. II, 
chap. XV. 

The Fall of Fort Sumter: Rhodes, Vol. Ill, chap, xiv; McMaster, Vol. 
VIII, chap, xcvii; Stephenson (Chronicles), chap, vi; Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 70- 
74; Burgess, Vol. I, chap, vii; Greeley, Vol. I, chaps, xxviii, xxLx; W. E. 
Dodd, Expansion and Conflict (Riverside History, Vol. IV), chap, xiii; Chad- 
wick, chaps, xii-xix; S. W. Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War; Abner 
Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie; C. E. Merriam, 
American Political Theories, chap, vi; J. G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of the 
War, chaps, ii, iii; Davis, Vol. I, part iv; J. B. Moore, Works of James 
Buchanan, Vol. XI (use complete table of contents) . 



338 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Republican Convention of i860 at Chicago: Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 
456-473; Burgess, Vol. I, pp. 58-67; Hart, Vol. IV, No. 50; Stanwood, pp. 
290-297; James Schouler, History of the United States, Vol. V, pp. 457-461; 
NicoLAY and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, a History, Vol. II, pp. 255-278. 

2. Alexander H. Stephens, a Southern Antisecessionist: Nicolay and 
Hay, Vol. Ill, pp. 266-275; Johnston and Browne, Alexander H. Stephens, 
pp. 357-387; Louis Pendleton, Alexander H. Stephens, pp. 153-170; Hart, 
Vol. IV, No. 53 ; Henry Cleveland, Letters and Speeches of Alexander H. 
Stephens, pp. 694-713; A. H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War 
between the States, Vol. II, pp. 299 £f. 

3. Efforts at Compromise, 1860-1861: Chadwick, pp. 166-183; Hart, 
Vol. IV, Nos. 63, 65, 68, 69; Nicolay and Hay, Vol. Ill, pp. 214-238; Greeley, 
Vol. I, pp. 351-406; W. G. Brown, The Lower South in American History, 
pp. 83-112; MacDonald, Nos. 93, 95, 96; Curtis, Vol. II, pp. 439-444; Mrs. 
Chapman Coleman, Life of John J. Crittenden, Vol. II, pp. 224-260. 

4. The Struggle to keep Missouri in the Union: Burgess, Vol. I, pp. 
186-191 ; Lucien Carr, Missouri, pp. 267-341 ; Greeley, Vol. I, pp. 488-492 ; 
S. B. Harding, Missouri Party Struggles in the Civil War {American Historical 
Association Reports, Vol. VII, pp. 85-103); Schouler, Vol. VI, pp. 186-192; 
Nicolay and Hay, Vol. IV, pp. 206-226; T. L. Snead, The Fight for Missouri. 

5. John Brown, Apostle: T. W. Higginson, Cheerfid Yesterdays, pp. 199- 
234, 25S-262; O. P. Anderson, A Voice from Harpers Ferry; Hart, Vol. IV, 
Nos. 47, 48; Chadwick, pp. 67-89; Rhodes, Vol. II, pp. 401-416; J. G. 
Whittier, Brown of Ossawatomie; M. J. Wright, The Trial and Execution of 
John Brown {American Historical Association Reports, Vol. IV, pp. 111-126) ; 
O. G. Villard, John Brown, An Autobiography Fifty Years After, pp. 558-s8a 



CHAPTER XVI 
THE CIVIL WAR 

The Opposing Forces 

484. North and South Embattled. So the men of the North 
and the sons of Dixie ^ were mustering to arms in the spring of 
1 86 1. Each side doubted whether the other really meant to fight; 
each believed that, if they fought, its own victory would be short 
and decisive. Each was absolutely convinced of the righteousness 
of its own cause. "War has been forced upon us by the folly and 
fanaticism of the Northern abolitionists," said an Atlanta paper ; 
"we fight for our liberties, our altars, our firesides. . . . Surely 
8,000,000 people armed in the holy cause of liberty . . . are in- 
vincible by any force the North can send against them." On the 
other side of Mason and Dixon's line Northern mass meetings re- 
solved that "this infamous, hell-born rebellion against the mild- 
est, the most beneficent government ever vouchsafed to men" should 
be speedily put down, and "our glorious Constitution restored in 
every part of our country." Thirty years of gathering bitterness 
had made it absolutely impossible for the men of the North and 
of the South to understand each other. As early even as 1832 our 
distinguished French visitor and critic De Tocqueville had proph- 
esied the "inevitable separation" of the two sections.^ 

485. The Resources of the Two Sections: Population. North 
and South were unequally matched for the great struggle that was 

1 The boundary line which was run in 1 764-1 767 between the colonies of Pennsylvania 
and Maryland, by the surveyors Mason and Dixon (p. 53, note i), became the dividing line 
between free and slave soil. The Southerners called their side of Mason and Dixon's line 
" Dixie land " or " Dixie." 

2 It was apparently the honest conviction of Northerners that every man south of Mason 
and Dixon's line was a Preston Brooks, and of Southerners that every man north of the line 
was a John Brown. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the London Tbncs, found that on 
one side of the Ohio River he was among " abolitionists, cutthroats, Lincolnite mercenaries, 
invaders, assassins," and on the other side among " rebels, robbers, conspirators, wretches 
bent on destroying the most perfect government on the face of the earth." He testified 
that there was " certainly less vehemence and bitterness among the Northerners," but no 
less determination. 

339 



340 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

before them. Although the seceding and the loyal states were about 
equal in territory, the resources of the North far exceeded those of 
the South. Of the 31,000,000 inhabitants of the United States by 
the census of i860, there were 19,000,000 in the eighteen free states 
of the North, 3,000,000 in the four loyal slave states of Delaware, 
Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and 9,000,000 in the eleven 
states of the Southern Confederacy. But of the last 9,000,000, 
nearly one half (3,600,000) were negro slaves. For military service 
the North could furnish 5,000,000 men between the ages of eighteen 
and sixty, to about 1,500,000 in the South. Furthermore the popu- 
lation of the North was increasing very rapidly (41 per cent in 
the decade 1850-1860), whereas in most of the states of the South 
it was almost stationary. During the decade 1850-1860 immigrants 
\\ (mostly Irish and Germans) had come into the United States in 
numbers equal to the entire slave population of the seceding states 
and had all gone into the free North to increase the wealth produced 
by the mills, the forges, and the wheat fields.^ 

486. Industries. Because cotton formed two thirds of the exports 
of the United States in i860 ($125,000,000 out of $197,000,000), 
the South was deceived into thinking that it was the most pros- 

j perous part of the country and that its slave labor was making New 
I! England rich. But the South overlooked the fact that a country's 
wealth consists not in the amount of its exports but in its ability 
to distribute the necessities and comforts and luxuries of life to a 
growing population. Measured by this standard of wealth, the 
South was poor in i860 in spite of its $235,000,000 crop of cotton. 
For while a few thousand rich planters were selling this crop and 
investing their profits in more negroes and more land, a majority of 
the white inhabitants of the South were in comparative poverty and 
idleness, seeing the land absorbed by the cotton plantations and 
the labor market filled with negro slaves. 

487. Social Progress. Manufactures, railroad mileage, the 
growth of cities, the diffusion of knowledge, progress in art and 

1 There was no result of the Compromise of. 1850 more favorable to the North than its 
postponement of the great Civil War for ten years. During that decade the states of the 
Northwest were filled up with a hardy, loyal population, who furnished immense strength 
to the Northern side during the war. Wisconsin, for example, gained 475,000 inhabitants, 
and Michigan over 650,000, in the decade. Discerning Southerners since Calhoun's day 
had ^een the aflwaintage of fighting soon if they fought at all- 



THE CIVIL WAR 



341 



letters, are all signs of a country's prosperity. The South had hardly 
any manufactures in 1860.^ She spun and wove but 2^ per cent 
of the cotton she raised, and only one fourth of the 31,000 miles of 
railroad track in the United States was laid on her soil. While the 
free states of the North abounded in thriving cities, equipped with 
gas and water systems, tramways, public schools and libraries, hos- 
pitals, banks, and churches, the census of i860 found only six 



toim'imkhere, iicu y^iCanTamie/mtlcnittm', 



ism; Tmu6a\ i jf 



T<i^-^ w.Q^liv.afi 




A GROUP OF WAR ENVELOPES 

"cities" in Alabama with a population of 1000 or over, four in 
Louisiana, and none in Arkansas.- The public-school system was 
but meagerly developed before the war. Fifteen per cent of the 
adult male white population of Virginia (in addition of course to 
practically all the negroes) were unable to read or write, according 
to the census of 1850, while only two fifths of one per cent of the 
adult males of Massachusetts were illiterate. 



1 The North turned out manufactures in iS6o valued 31^1,730,330,000, compared with an 
output valued at $155,000,000 for the South, a ratio of 12 to i. Governor Wise of Virginia 
said to the people of his state in 1859: "Commerce has long since spread her sails and 
sailed away from you. . . . You have not as yet dug more than enough coal to warm your- 
selves at your own hearths . . . you have not yet spun coarse cotton enough to clothe your 
own slaves." As against a cotton crop worth $235,000,000 raised by the South, the North 
produced wheat and com valued at $845,000,000. 

2 Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, while on a Northern visit as President-elect, in 1848-1S49, 
looked from a height near Springfield, Massachusetts, on a group of thriving towns and 
remarked, " You cannot see any such sight as that in a Southern state 1 " 



342 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

488. Slavery the Bane of the South. The cause of the back- 
ward social and industrial condition in the South was the plantation 
system founded on negro slavery, which developed a ''caste" of 
some 380,000 aristocratic planters at the expense of over 5,000,000 
non-slaveholding whites. Whatever relieving touches there are in the 
picture of the slave plantation, — the devoted Southern woman nurs- 
ing her sick negroes with her own hands, and the strong and tender 
attachment of the children of the household to the old black 
"mammy" in whose arms they had been sung to sleep since infancy, 
— the system of slavery was a blight on industry and a constant 
menace to the character of the slaveholder. That the men of the 
South, in defending what they believed to be their rights under 
a government of "liberty and equality," were pledged to perpetuate 
such an institution was a misfortune which is deplored by none more 
heartily than by the descendants of those men today .^ 

489. Helper's "Impending Crisis." We may wonder why the 
millions of citizens in the South, who had no slaves and no in- 
terest in slavery, should have fought through four years with des- 
perate gallantry for the maintenance of a system which meant for 
them only disadvantage. One of their number, Hinton R. Helper 
of North Carolina, had published a book in 1857, entitled "The 
Impending Crisis," in which he showed with a merciless array of 
figures the economic burden which slavery entailed upon the South. 
Helper called the slaveholding aristocracy no better than the basest 
" ruffians, outlaws, and criminals " and advised " no cooperation with 
them in religion, no affiliation with them in society." The poorer 
whites were not able to read and understand the figures and 
arguments of Helper's book. They believed that the " Black Re- 
publicans" of the North meant to subjugate them and turn their 
land over to the negro. They rose in a mass to defend a civilization 
which, had they but realized it, was the worst enemy of their 
interests. 

490. Military Advantages of the South. The leaders of the 
South knew, of course, that the North was superior in resources, 
but they counted on several real advantages and several anticipated 

1 Louis Pendleton of Georgia, in his biography of Alexander H. Stephens, writes (1904), 
"Reflecting Southern men today are filled with sadness as they read their grandfathers' 
eulogies of an institution which wrought the ruin of the fairest portion of the United States." 



THE CIVIL WAR 343 

developments to give them the victory. First, and most important 
of all, they would be fighting on their own soil, whereas the North, 
in order to "put down the rebellion" would have to invade Southern 
/territory. The men who fight on the defensive are always at an 
advantage. They know the lay of the land ; they have their base 
of supplies close at hand ; they are inspired by the thought that 
they are defending their homes. Then, too, the Southerners, by 
nature and training, were better fitted for war than the mechanics, 
clerks, and farmers of the North. The Southern temper was more 
ardent. The men of the South commonly carried firearms. They 
were accustomed from boyhood to the saddle. In the Mexican War 
many more Southern than Northern officers had been trained for 
the great civil contest. 

491. The South disappointed in its Expectations. Besides her 
actual military advantages the South counted on help in three direc- 
tions. She expected that foreign nations, especially Great Britain 
and France, dependent on her for their supply 6f raw cotton, would 
lend their aid to establish an independent cotton-raising South, 
which would levy no duties on their manufactures. She thought too 
that the first move in behalf of a new republic whose corner stone 
was slavery would bring all the other slaveholding states into the 
Confederacy. And she looked to the Democrats of the North, who 
had cast 1,370,000 votes against Abraham Lincoln and whose leaders 
had repeatedly shown signs of Southern leanings, to defeat any at- 
tempt of the Republicans to '' subjugate the South." We have seen 
how completely deceived the South was in the last expectation, when 
the shot fired on Fort Sumter roused the North as one man to pledge 
President Lincoln its aid in defending the Union.^ We have seen 
also how only four of the eight slaveholding states north of the 
cotton states joined the Confederacy on Lincoln's call for troops 
(P- 335)- The South was equally disappointed in the hope of foreign 
intervention and aid. Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of 
strict neutrality a month after the fall of Fort Sumter ; and Emperor 
Napoleon III, although expressing to Mr. Slidell, the Confederate 

1 The Southern press was very bitter over the " desertion " of the Democrats of the North : 
"Where are Messrs. Gushing, Van Buren, Pierce, Buchanan, Douglas ct id oinne gemis, — 
where are they in the bloody crusade proposed by President Lincoln against the South ? . . . 
Hounding on the fanatic warfare ! . . . The Northern politicians have all left us. Let them 
fly — all, false thanes I " 



344 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

envoy to France, his personal sympathy for the South, was careful 
to avoid any official breach with the government at Washington, 

492. The State of West Virginia. Moreover, large portions even 
of some of the seceding states remained faithful to the Union, es- 
pecially the mountain districts in western Virginia and North Caro- 
lina and in eastern Tennessee. Over forty counties in western 
Virginia broke away from the state and formed a loyal government, 
which was recognized by President Lincoln and later received into 
the Union (1863) as the state of West Virginia. A striking proof 
of the divergent views of loyalty in North and South is the fact that 
the wise and moderate Robert E. Lee called the people of West 
Virginia " traitors " for leaving their state to adhere to the Union. 

So the men of the North and the sons of Dixie were arrayed 
against each other, in the spring of 1861, for a contest which none 
dreamed would be the most prolonged and bloody since Napoleon's 
rash attempt, at the beginning of the century, to subjugate the 
continent of Europe. 

From Bull Run to Gettysburg 

493. The Importance of the Civil War. The work entitled 
"The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and 
Navies in the War of the Rebellion," published by the government 
at Washington, fills more than 130 bulky volumes, and chronicles 
over 2000 engagements, of which about 150 are important enough 
to be called "battles." A mere list of the titles of historic biog- 
raphies and memoirs relating to the Civil War would fill hundreds 
of pages. Such a list prepared only a year after the close of the 
war (Bartlett's "Literature of the Rebellion," 1866) contains 6073 
such titles. This immense mass of literature pertaining to the 
Civil War is a proof of the significance of that event in our country's 
history. Except for the critical years 1775-1789, in which our 
nation was formed, no other period in our history can compare 
in importance with the great Civil War of 1861-1865, which de- 
termined that the nation which the fathers had founded should en- 
dure one and undivided, and removed from it the ugly institution of 
negro slavery, which for decades had cursed its soil, embroiled its 
politics, and outraged the conscience of half its people. 



346 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

494. How we shall study the War. We need not go into the 
military details of the Civil War in order to appreciate its impor- 
tance. Military history is useful only for the special student of 
the science of war. The marching and countermarching of the 
2,000,000^ men who fought the battles of the Civil War, the dis- 
position of artillery, cavalry, and infantry by thousands of officers 
in hundreds of important engagements, the countless deeds of heroism 
on both sides, on land and sea, we must pass over, only to sketch 
in outline the few great campaigns on which the fortunes of the 
republic hung. Two things we must constantly bear in mind : first, 
the superior resources of the North in men and wealth, which told 
with increasing emphasis as the war progressed ; and secondly, 
the advantage that the South had in fighting on her own soil against 
the invading armies of the North. ^ Had the South possessed the 
resources of the North, she could never have been beaten ; had 
she attempted to invade the North, her armies would have been 
repulsed at the borders. 

495. " On to Richmond ! " We turn now to the field of battle. 
When Virginia seceded, the capital of the Confederacy was changed 
from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, and the Confederate Con- 
gress was called to meet at the new capital, July 20, 1861. The 
North, in the first flush of its enthusiastic response to Lincoln's call 
for troops, was determined that the Confederate Congress should 
not meet. '' On to Richmond ! " was the cry that rang through the 
North. The raw troops were not properly organized or drilled, and 
the quartermaster's and commissariat departments^ were not pre- 
pared for a campaign. But President Lincoln and General Scott 
yielded to the popular demand for a move on Richmond, especially 

1 Livermore, in his " Numbers and Losses in the Civil War" (1901), our best authority, 
gives the total numbers on each side, on the basis of an enlistment for three years, — Union, 
1,556,678; Confederate, 1,082,119. 

2 Strictly speaking, it was not a " civil war." That term refers to a struggle between two 
opposing factions or parties (religious or political) living on the same soil. In the war of 
1861-1865 a united South, claiming to be an independent country, was invaded by the armies 
of a (less) united North. Compare the actual "civil war" in Kansas in 1855-1856, where 
free-state men and slave-state men were fighting for control of their common territory. 
Alexander H. Stephens more accurately calls the war of 1861-1S65 the War behveeii the 
States. A still better title would be the War of Secession. 

3 The quartermaster's department has charge of the transportation of all the baggage, 
food, clothing, and blankets of the army, and the provision of all supplies except food and 
munitions. The commissariat department's business is to provide the supplies of food for 
the soldiers. 



THE CIVIL WAR 347 

as the term of service of the militia, who had enlisted in April for 
only three months, was about to expire. 

496. The Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas). General Beaure- 
gard, with 22,000 troops, was at Manassas Junction, a town near the 
little stream called Bull Run, about thirty-five miles southwest of 
Washington. In the Shenandoah valley, across the Blue Ridge, were 
9000 more men under General Joseph E. Johnston, who was to 
become, next to Lee, the greatest commander of the South. General 
Patterson, a veteran of the War of 181 2, was to hold Johnston in the 
valley, while General McDowell, with an army of 30,000, attacked 
General Beauregard at Manassas. McDowell's '^ grand army" set out 
in high spirits, July 16, accompanied by many of the congressmen and 
officials in Washington, who went to see the "rebellion crushed by 
a single blow." The battle (on the twenty-first) was well planned 
and bravely fought. Up to early afternoon the advantage was with 
the Union troops,^ but at the critical moment Johnston's army, 
which had eluded Patterson and joined Beauregard on the twentieth 
with 6000 troops, appeared on the field and turned the Union 
victory into a rout. The undisciplined soldiers of McDowell, wearied 
with the day's, fighting, threw down their muskets and fled to the 
Potomac. For two days they straggled into Washington, and the 
capital was in a panic for fear Beauregard and Johnston would come 
on their heels. 

497. McClellan in Command of the Union Army. The disaster 
at Bull Run sobered the overconfident enthusiasm of the Northern- 
ers, but did not destroy their determination. They set to work in 
earnest to prepare for the long, severe struggle that was before them. 
George B. McClellan, a young general who had done brilliant work 
in holding West Virginia for the Union in May and June, was now 
put in command of the army on the Potomac. McClellan was 
a magnificent organizer and drillmaster, and by the autumn of 1861 
he had the 180,000 men who poured into his camp in response to 
Lincoln's call organized into a splendid army nearly three times the 
size of the opposing forces under Lee and Johnston. The aged 
General Scott resigned on the last day of October, and McClellan was 
made general in chief of the forces of the United States. 

1 Jefferson Davis, who came in person from Richmond to the battlefield in the afternoon, 
was met by fleeing Confederate soldiers, who told him that the battle was lost 



348 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

498. The Peninsular Campaign. McClellan could and should 
have taken Richmond in the autumn of 1861, but he was cautious 
to the point of timidity. Personally brave, he feared for the magnifi- 
cent army under his command. He magnified the enemy's forces 
to three times their actual number and looked on the loss of a brigade 
from his own army as a great calamity. He berated Lincoln and 
Stanton for not sending him more reenforcements.^ It was not 
until well into the spring of 1862 that McClellan, after repeated 
orders from Washington to advance, began to move up the peninsula 
between the York and James Rivers (see map, p. 364). Even then 
the Peninsular campaign, which should have been a steady triumphal 
march to the Confederate capital, like Scott's march from Vera Cruz 
up to the city of Mexico in 1847, was a slow, guarded approach of 
many weeks' duration, as if against an enemy vastly superior in 
forces. Once, within four miles of Richmond, and already within 
sight of its church spires, McClellan decided to shift his base to the 
James River because Lincoln detained McDowell's division of 
40,000 men to protect Washington.^ Lee and Johnston were quick 
to seize the moment of the deliverance of Richmond to follow up the 
Army of the Potomac. McClellan, always masterly on the defensive, 
won several engagements from his pursuers, finally routing them 
decisively at Malvern Hill (July i, 1862) in one of the severest 
battles of the war. Richmond again seemed to be within his grasp, 
but instead of advancing he led his armj'- back to Harrisons Landing 
on the James River within reach of the Union gunboats. The famous 
Peninsular campaign was ended. Richmond was still undisturbed. 
President Lincoln removed McClellan from the command of the 
armies of the United States, July 11, 1862. 

1 McClellan took it upon himself to criticize the administration at Washington unsparingly, 
spoke of the " insane folly " of Stanton and Chase, and constantly prated about " saving the 
country." To Stanton, who had assumed the War portfolio in January, 1862, displacing 
Cameron, he wrote : " You must send me large reenforcements, and send them at once. . . . 
If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons 
in Washington [President Lincoln]. You have done your best to sacrifice this army." Re- 
markable language for a commander with an army already more than double the strength of 
his adversaries to use to his superiors in Washington ! 

2 The cause of the detention of McDowell's troops was the campaign of General 
Thomas J. Jackson in the Shenandoah valley. This wonderful commander (a third great 
Virginian, with Lee and Johnston) with an army of 17,000 men had defeated and outwitted 
50,000 Union troops in the valley and threatened the capital so effectively that the eyes of 
the administration were drawn off the Army of the Potomac. It was Jackson who saved 
Richmond. Jackson was a rare combination of fighter and religious fanatic, not unlike 



THE CIVIL WAR 349 

499. The Trent Affair. A year had passed since the battle of 
Bull Run, yet the Union arms had made no progress in Virginia. 
But the United States navy, under the efficient management of 
Secretary Welles, had accomplished important results. First, it had 
established so effective a blockade along the 3000 miles of the Con- 
federate coast that the exports of cotton dropped in value from 
$125,000,000 in i860 to $4,000,000 in 1862. The Southerners, es- 
pecially after their victory at Bull Run, could not believe that 
Great Britain would stand by quietly and allow the North to shut 
off her cotton supply by a blockade. Their expectations of British 
intervention were heightened almost to a certainty when, in No- 
vember, 1 86 1, Captain Wilkes of the Union war sloop San Jacinto 
stopped the British mail steamer Trent as she was sailing from 
Havana, forcibly removed from her deck the Confederate commis- 
sioners to Great Britain and France, Messrs. Mason and Slidell, 
and took them as prisoners to Fort Warren in Boston harbor. The 
deed was hailed with rejoicing in the North. The Navy Depart- 
ment congratulated Wilkes, and the House of Representatives gave 
him a formal vote of thanks. The South was in high hopes that 
this insult to the British flag would involve the administration at 
Washington in a war with England, and the Queen's government 
began, in fact, to send troops to Canada. But the sober sense of 
Lincoln, Seward, and Sumner^ realized that» Wilkes's act, however 
gratifying to public sentiment in the North, was a high-handed 
outrage of the principle of the inviolability of vessels of neutral 
nations, for the defense of which we had gone to war with Great 
Britain in 1812. Consequently, Seward informed the British min- 
ister. Lord Lyons, on December 26, that the prisoners in Fort 
Warren would be "cheerfully liberated." Mason and Slidell were 
given up, the British government was satisfied, and the blockade of 
the Southern ports continued undisturbed. 

500. The Virginia and the Monitor. The Northern navy won 
a notable victory in a strange kind of battle that took place in 

Oliver Cromwell. At the battle of Bull Run one of his fellow generals said to his troops, 
" Look at Jackson standing there firm as a «tone wall ! " From this remark the general got 
the name " Stonewall " Jackson. 

1 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was the chairman of the Senate committee on foreign 
relations. He did a great deal to win the reluctant sympathy of the English people for the 
Northern cause 



350 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



Hampton Roads, Virginia, March g, 1862. The Confederates had 
raised the sunken hull of the Merrimac at the Norfolk navy yards 
and, covering her with a sloping roof of iron rails smeared with 
plumbago and tallow, had made of her the first "ironclad" in the 
history of naval warfare. This formidable craft, rechristened the 
Virginia, easily destroyed two of the finest ships of our wooden navy 
in Hampton Roads, on March 8, and waited only for the morrow to 
destroy the rest of the fleet and then sail up the Potomac to shell 
the city of Washington, But that same night there arrived at Hamp- 
ton Roads from New York a war vessel stranger even than the 

Virginia. This was the 
Monitor (invented by Cap- 
tain Ericsson), a small iron 
craft shaped like a torpedo 
boat, her decks flush with 
the water, and having amid- 
ships a revolving gun turret 
rising only a few feet. A 
witty observer called the 
boat "a cheese box on a 
raft." The Monitor placed 
herself between the Virginia 
and the wooden ships of the 
federal navy, and after an 
all-day fight the dreaded Confederate ram steamed back to the 
Virginia shore. The wooden ships were saved, but at the same 
time they were made forever obsolete. This first battle in history 
between ironclads announced that henceforth the world's navies 
were to be ships of steel. 

501. The War in the West. While the wearisome and futile 
Peninsular campaign was dragging through the spring months of 
1862, relieved only by the victory of the Monitor, the Union arms 
were making splendid progress in the West. Of equal importance 
to the Union cause with the blockade of the Southern ports and 
the hoped-for capture of Richmond was the opening of the Mis- 
sissippi River, which the Confederates held from its junction with 
the Ohio down to its mouth. The possession of the river would 
bring the Unionists the double advantage of freeing an outlet for the 




THE VIRGINIA DESTROYING THE CUM- 
BERLAND IN HAMPTON ROADS 



THE CIVIL WAR 



351 



commerce of the Northwestern states and cutting off the states of 
Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the rest of the Confederacy. 
The credit for accomplishing this great work belongs, more than to all 
others, to General Ulysses S. Grant and Captain David G. Farragut. 




GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT 



502. Grant's Victories on the Mississippi. Grant (born in Ohio 
in 1822) was a graduate of West Point. He had served creditably 
in the Mexican War, but since its close had led a thriftless and rather 
intemperate life. The outbreak of the Civil War found him, at the 



352 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



age of thirty-nine, working in a leather and hardware store in 
Galena, Illinois, and dependent on his father for the support of wife 
and family. But the call to war transformed the poor business man 
into a military genius of the highest order. In February, 1862, with 
the consent of General H. W. Halleck, who commanded the Union 
armies of the West, Grant seized the very important forts Henry 
and Donelson,^ on the lower Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, 
and carried his victorious army up the Tennessee River, 100 
miles across the state of Tennessee, to Pittsburg Landing. While 
waiting here for the arrival of General Buell's army, which Halleck 
had ordered to join him from Nashville, Grant was attacked by a 
superior force under General Albert S. Johnston, the best Con- 
federate general in the West. The terrific battle of Shiloh (or Pitts- 
burg Landing) lasted two days (April 6-7, 1862). At nightfall of 
the first day the Union troops had been driven back to the bluffs 
along the river ; but before morning Buell's army arrived, and the 
second day's fighting was a triumph for the Union side. The Con- 
federates fell back to Corinth, Mississippi. They had lost 10,000 
men, but could better have spared 10,000 more than lose their gal- 
lant commander. General Johnston, who was killed on the field. The 
capture of Forts Henry and Donelson and the victory of Shiloh 
cleared western Tennessee of Confederate troops,^ while General 
John Pope and Commodore Foote in a parallel campaign brought 
their gunboats down the Mississippi and secured the river as far 
south as the high bluffs of Vicksburg. 

503. Farragut captures New Orleans. Meanwhile the great 
river was being opened from the southern end. New Orleans, which 
lies some no miles up the river, was protected by the strong forts 
Jackson and St. Philip and by a heavy "boom" of chained and 

1 These forts, built at points where the two great rivers were but twelve miles apart, both 
secured the navigation of the rivers and strengthened the Confederate line of defense, which 
extended from Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi, eastward across the state (see map, 
p. 345). Grant captured 17,000 troops, with large quantities of supplies, at Donelson. To the 
request of the Confederate general as to the terms of capitulation, Grant replied, " Uncon- 
ditional surrender." The phrase stuck to him, and U. S. Grant became in popular language 
''Unconditional Surrender" Grant. 

2 Except for Memphis, which surrendered in June. President Lincoln immediately began 
the " reconstruction " of Tennessee by appointing Andrew Johnson of that state as military 
governor. Johnson was a man of great energy and ambition, who had worked his way up 
from a tailor's bench to the United States Senate. He belonged to the " poor white " class 
oi the South and was an intensely loyal Union man. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



353 



St. Lou IB 



M I S S O 



anchored hulks stretching a quarter of a mile across the current be- 
tween the forts. On the night of the twenty- third of April, 1862, 
Captain David G. Farragut, in a most spectacular battle, broke the 
boom and ran the gantlet 
of the fire of the forts. 
New Orleans was left de- 
fenseless. The small Con- 
federate army withdrew, 
and General B. F. Butler 
entered the city, which he 
ruled for over six months 
under military regime. 
The capture of New Or- 
leans opened the river as 
far north as Port Hudson. 
Thus, by midsummer of 
1862, only the high bluffs 
of Vicksburg and Port 
Hudson, with the 150 de- 
fenseless miles of river 
bank between, were left to 
the Confederacy.^ 

504. Failure of the 
Army of the Potomac. 
The successes in the West 
contrasted strikingly with 
the delays and disappoint- 
ments of the army in the 
East, and when McClellan 
was relieved of his com- 
mand in July it was natural 
that a Western general 

should succeed him. Halleck, under whose command the brilliant oper- 
ations in Tennessee had been conducted, was called to Washington, 
July II, 1862, as general in chief of the armies of the United States, to 
advise the President and the Secretary of War ; while General Pope 

1 These 150 miles, however, were very important as a " bridge," over which came immense 
stores of Louisiana sugar and Texas beef and grain for the armies of the Confederacy. 




Grant's Campaigns 1862-1863*******»4^^ 



THE WAR IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 



354 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



40< 

; jphambershjjrg o»^^ y-/' 

^Frederick 



was given command of a new " Army of Virginia," independent of Mc- 
Clellan's diminished Army of the Potomac. The ten months that 
followed, from August, 1862, to June, 1863, present a dreary record 
of defeat for the Union cause in Virginia. General Lee, with his 
magnificent corps of lieutenants, — '' Stonewall " Jackson, Longstreet, 
Ewell, the Hills, and Stuart, — outwitted and outfought the Union 
commanders at every turn. Pope was beaten at a second battle of 
Bull Run (August, 1862) and his entire army forced to retreat on 
Washington.^ In spite of the protests of Stanton and Halleck, 

McClellan was restored 
to command and hailed 
with joy by his old sol- 
diers. He stopped Lee's 
invasion of Maryland 
in the bloodiest single 
day's battle of the war, 
at Sharpsburg on the 
Antietam Creek (Sep- 
tember 17, 1862) ; but 
with his old reluctance 
to follow up a victory 
by crushing the foe he 
let the shattered Con- 
federate army get back 
across the Potomac to 
Virginia soil. He was removed again by the distressed administration 
at Washington, and General Burnside was put in his place, only to 
suffer an awful repulse in his reckless assault on Marye's Heights 
behind the town of Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862). Then 
General Joseph Hooker, " Fighting Joe," who succeeded Burnside, 
was routed in the three days' fight at Chancellorsville (May 1-4, 
1863).^ 

1 An especially humiliating feature of Pope's defeat was the capture of all his stores and 
his own headquarters by a brilliant move of " Stonewall " Jackson. The stores, filling a train 
of cars two miles long, were burned after the Confederates had taken all the plunder they 
could carry, and the light of the costly bonfire could be seen even from Washington. 

2 After a day's fighting at Chancellorsville, " Stonewall " Jackson, riding back in the 
twilight with his staff from a reconnoissance, was mistaken by Confederate sharpshooters 
for a Union officer and fatally shot. The loss of Jackson was one of the severest blows to 
the Confederate cause. 




Appoinattox°-N-; Antietam Campaign, Sept. 1S62 — ^-. 



Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863 



LEE S INVASIONS OF THE NORTH 



THE* CIVIL WAR 



355 



505. The Lowest Point in the Union Fortunes. The early 
months of 1863 mark the lowest ebb of the fortunes of the Union 
cause. For nearly two years the superior Federal forces in Virginia 
had been trying to take Richmond, but they had not been able even 
to hold their own position south of the Rappahannock. General Lee 
was planning another invasion of the North. Union soldiers were 
deserting at the rate of a thousand a week, and hundreds of officers 







From the '' Pholographic History oi tlie Civil War.'' Copyriglii by Patriot Publisliing Company 
THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC IN CAMP 



were finding excuses to leave the army for "vacations." The at- 
tempts to draft new recruits into the army were met with serious 
resistance in many states. In New York City the draft riots of 
July, 1863, resulted in the destruction of $1,500,000 worth of prop- 
erty and the loss of 1000 lives. The cost of the war was enormous ; 
the debt was increasing at the rate of $2,500,000 a day. The Secre- 
tary of the Treasury was having difficulty in borrowing enough 
money to keep the army in the field. A widespread conviction that 
Lincoln's administration was a failure was shown by the triumph 
of the Democrats, in the elections of 1862, in such important states 
as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and 
Wisconsin. Clement Vallandigham of Ohio declared in a speech 



3S6 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

in the House early in the year 1863 : "You have not conquered the 
South. You never will. . . . JVIoney you have expended without 
limit, and blood poured out like water. . . . Defeat, debt, taxation, 
and sepulchers, — these are your only trophies."^ But the darkest 
hour is the hour before the dawn. In June, 1863, the Southern hopes 
were high. In the West the great fortress of Vicksburg, which Grant 
and Sherman had been manoeuvering against for months, still block- 
aded the lower Mississippi to the Union fleets ; and in the East, 
General Lee, at the height of his power and popularity, was crossing 
the Potomac northward with a magnificent army of 75,000 veterans. 
But on the fourth of July, Lee was leading his defeated army back 
to the Potomac after the tremendous fight at Gettysburg, while 
General Grant was entering Vicksburg in triumph. 

506. The Battle of Gettysburg. The battle of Gettysburg (July 
1-3, 1863) was the most important battle of the war and the only 
one fought on the free soil of the North.^ Knowing the widespread 
discouragement in the Northern states and the dissatisfaction in 
many quarters with Lincoln's conduct of the war, Lee hoped that 
a brilliant stroke as near New York as he could get might terrify the 
Northern bankers and lead them to compel the administration to 
stop the war for lack of funds and recognize the Southern Con- 
federacy. General George G. Meade, who had just succeeded Hooker 
(June 27) in the command of the Army of the Potomac, met Lee's 
attack with a fine army of over 80,000 men securely posted on the 
heights of Round Top and Cemetery Ridge, south of the town of 
Gettysburg. The first and second days' fighting (July i, 2) was 
favorable to the Confederates, but reenforcements kept pouring in 
for the Army of the Potomac, and, in spite of heavy losses, the 
Federal position was being strengthened from hour to hour. At 
the beginning of the third day of the fight General Meade had over 
90,000 men posted on the heights above and around Gettysburg. 

1 Vallandigham was afterwards arrested by General Bumside and court-martialed for 
treason. Lincoln, as a grim sort of joke, made his punishment exile into the lines of the 
Confederacy. Edward Everett Hale's famous story " The Man without a Country," appearing 
in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, was written to show the sad failure of such un- 
patriotic conduct as Vallandigham's. 

2 There were several "raids" into Northern territory — in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsyl- 
vania — by the renowned "irregular" cavalry rangers of Morgan, Mosby, and Stuart. But 
these raids succeeded only in terrorizing a few villages and plundering such booty as the 
flying horsemen could take with them. They were a foolish, unproductive kind of warfare. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



357 



507. Pickett's Charge. Lee, fagged with his immense labors and 
desperate in his demand for victory, now failed for once in general- 
ship. Disregarding the almost tearful remonstrances of General 
Longstreet, he sent General Pickett with 15,000 men, the flower of 
the Confederate infantry, to carry by storm the impregnable position 
of the Union troops, under General W. S. Hancock, on Cemetery 
Ridge. It was the most 

dramatic moment of the 
war, as Pickett's splen- 
did division, in perfect 
order, swept across the 
wide plain which sepa- 
rated the two armies 
and dashed up the op- 
posite slope in the face 
of the withering fire of 
the Union guns. The 
men went down like 
grain before a hail- 
storm, but still there 
was no pause. A hun- 
dred led by Armistead 
pierced the Union line 
and planted the flag of 
the Confederacy on the 
ridge — the ''high-water 
mark of the Rebellion." 
But no human bravery 

could stand against the blasting wall of fire that closed in upon 
Pickett's gallant men. The line wavered, then stopped, then bent 
slowly backward, and broke. The day, the battle, and the Southern 
cause were lost ! 

508. The Fall of Vicksburg. The next day, the ''glorious 
fourth" of July, at evening, while the North was celebrating the 
great victory of Gettysburg, General Lee began his slow retreat to 
the Potomac through a heavy, dismal storm of rain. Lee's grief 
and chagrin would have been doubled had he known that, on that 
same dismal fourth of July, General Pemberton, after a valiant 




ROBERT E. LEE 



358 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

defense of six: months against the superior strategy and numbers of 
Grant and Sherman, had surrendered the stronghold of Vicksburg, 
with 170 cannon and 50,000 rifles, and had delivered over his starv- 
ing garrison of 30,000 men as prisoners of war.^. Five days after the 
fall of Vicksburg, Port Hudson yielded, and the Mississippi was 
again a Union stream from source to mouth, " The Father of 
Waters," wrote Lincoln exultantly, " goes again unvexed to the sea." 

The Triumph of the North 

509. The Turning Point of the War. The victories at Gettys- 
burg and Vicksburg were the turning point of the war. Not that 
the South as yet acknowledged defeat or even distress. On the 
contrary, the tone of her press and the utterances of her public 
men were more confident than ever. Newspapers in Richmond and 
Charleston actually hailed Gettysburg as a Confederate victory, 
presumably because Lee had been allowed to withdraw his shat- 
tered army across the Potomac without molestation.- But to men 
who did not let their zeal blind them to facts the disasters which 
overtook the Confederacy at Gettysburg and Vicksburg appeared to 
be almost beyond repair. It was not alone the loss of 60,000 soldiers 
from armies in which every man was sorely needed that made those 
midsummer days of 1863 so calamitous to the South. It was even 
more the change which they brought in the public sentiment of the 
North, in the attitude of Great Britain toward the Confederacy, and 
in the plan of campaign of the Union commanders. 

510. Financial Condition of the North. In the North the bank- 
ers, whose cash vaults Lee hoped to close tightly by his invasion of 
Pennsjdvania, now lent to the government freely, and private in- 
dividuals bought millions of dollars' worth of the "coupon bonds" 

1 The siege of Vicksburg was the only protracted siege of the war. The shelling of the 
city by Grant's mortars was so severe that many of the people lived in underground caves, 
and the inhabitants and garrison were compelled to eat mules, rats, and even shoe leather to 
keep from starvation. Pembeiton held out as long as he did in the constant hope that 
Johnston might break through Grant's lines and come to his relief. 

2 Lincoln was much distressed that Meade did not follow Lee up after Gettysburg and 
crush his army before it could get back over the Potomac. " We had them in our grasp,"' 
he said ; " we had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours." Still Meade was not 
relieved of his command. His army slowly followed Lee into Virginia and, after some 
unimportant skirmishing, went into winter quarters at Culpeper, about 75 miles northwest 
of Richmond 



THE CIVIL WAR 359 

issued to support the war. Secretary Chase had been obliged to 
pay 7.3 per cent interest on money loaned the government in 1861, 
when the public debt was less than $100,000,000; now, however, 
he could borrow all he wanted at 6 per cent, although the debt 
had risen to over $1,000,000,000. The rate of interest at which a 
country can borrow money is generally an index of the confidence 
the people have in the stability of the government. President 
Lincoln, in his annual message to Congress, December, 1863, 
could say: ''All the demands on the Treasury, including the pay of 
the army and navy, have been promptly met and fully satisfied. . . . 
By no people were the burdens incident to a great war ever more 
cheerfully borne." 

5n. How the Government financed the War. The government 
raised about $667,000,000 by taxation during the war and borrowed 
$2,620,000,000 more. The taxes were both ''direct" and "indirect": 
the former consisting of an income tax of 3 per cent on incomes 
under $10,000 and 5 per cent on those over $10,000; the lat- 
ter consisting of greatly increased tariff duties and internal 
revenue taxes on almost every article of consumption except 
one's daily bread. The government borrowed in two ways: 
it issued "notes" (or certificates of indebtedness) in payment 
of its obligations, and it sold "bonds" (or promises to pay back the 
amount borrowed with interest, at the end of a term of years). 
Secretary Chase, early in 1863, devised a very effective method 
of selling these bonds, by the creation of the national-bank system. 
Any group of five men, furnishing a specified capital, might be 
granted a charter by the national government to organize a banking 
business, if they purchased United States bonds and deposited them 
at Washington. They were then allowed to issue notes ("bank 
bills") up to the value of 90 per cent (since 1900, up to the full 
value) of the bonds, and the government assumed the responsibility 
for paying these notes if the bank failed. The bankers, of course, 
besides receiving the interest from their bonds on deposit, made 
a profit by lending their notes (or credit) to their customers at a fair 
rate of interest. The national-bank system was a benefit to all 
parties concerned. It enabled the government to sell its bonds 
readily ; it gave the banking capitalists of the country a chance to 
make a profit on their loans ; and it gave the borrowing public a 



36o THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

currency which was ''protected" by the government, whether the 
bank issuing it succeeded or failed. There were in 191 7 over 7600 
national banks in the United States, with an aggregate capital 
of over $1,000,000,000. These national banks are not to be con- 
fused with the National Bank of 1791-1811, 1816-1836. They are 
private institutions and enjoy none of the government's favors 
such as are described on page 161. They are called ''national" 
simply because they are chartered and inspected by the national 
government. 

512. Change of Sentiment in England. In England, though the 
\\Trent affair had been satisfactorily adjusted, the sympathy of the 

higher classes of society and of most of the government officials was 
decidedly in favor of the South. The long series of Federal re- 
verses in 1862 had strengthened their belief that President Lin- 
coln's government would fail to restore the Union. Men in high 
positions in the British government openly expressed their con- 
fidence in the Southern cause. Mr. Gladstone, then a cabinet 
minister, said in a speech at Newcastle, October 7, 1862 : "There 
is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South 
have made an army ; they are making, it appears, a navy ; and 
they have made what is more than either, — a nation. , . . We may 
anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern states so far 
as their separation from the North is concerned." British capitalists 
bought $10,000,000 worth of Confederate bonds offered them at 
the beginning of 1863, when the Southern cause looked brightest. 
The fall of Vicksburg sent the bonds down 20 per cent in value. The 
British people woke with a shock from their dream of an " invincible 
South," and all hope of aid from Great Britain, as President Davis 
sorrowfully acknowledged in his next message to the Confederate 
Congress, was lost.^ 

513. No Union Plan of Campaign before Gettysburg. The 
effect of the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on the conduct 
of the war was also important. Up to the middle of the year 1863 

1 While Mason was trying to get help in England for the Confederacy, Slidell was busy 
on the same errand in France. At a meeting with Emperor Napoleon III, in July, 1S62, 
Slidell made the offer of 100,000 bales of cotton (worth $12,500,000) if Napoleon would send 
a fleet to break the blockade of the Southern ports. Napoleon made efforts to get Great 
Britain and Russia to join him in demanding from the administration at Washington the inde- 
pendence of the South, but with no success. After Gettysburg all such efforts were stopped. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



361 



there had been no cooperation between the Union armies. The Army 
of the Potomac, in Virginia, had been battHng in vain to break 
through Lee's defense of Richmond. The army on the Mississippi 
had been slowly accomplishing its great task of opening the river. 
Meanwhile a third army under Buell (succeeded later by Rosecrans) 
had with difficulty been defending central Kentucky and Tennessee 
from the advance of the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. 



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THE CAMPAIGNS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE 



514. Bragg driven from Kentucky. Simultaneously with Lee's 
invasion of Maryland in September, 1862, Bragg had invaded Ken- 
tucky, appealing to the proslavery and states- rights -sentiment in the 
state with the confident manifesto, '' Kentuckians, I offer you the 
opportunity to free yourselves from the tyranny of a despotic ruler." 
Bragg brought 15,000 stands of arms for the Kentuckians, but they 
did not join his army. Buell turned him back from Kentucky in 
the battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862), and Rosecrans, after a 
tremendous three days' fight at ISIurfreesboro, Tennessee (December 
31-January 2), compelled him to retire to Chattanooga.^ 

1 The acquisition of eastern Tennessee was especially desired by Lincoln, on account of 
the great number of Union men in that part of the state. We have already seen how, after 
Grant's victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Lincoln had appointed Andrew Johnson as 
military governor of Tennessee ,(p. 352, note 2). 



362 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

515. The "Anaconda Policy." The fall of Vicksburg left the 
troops of Grant and Sherman free to move eastward across Mis- 
sissippi and Alabama, driving Johnston's inferior forces before them, 
and to join with Rosecrans at Chattanooga and push the Confederate 
armies across the lower end of the Appalachian range into Georgia. 
While this great flanking movement was going on from the West, 
the Army of the Potomac was to press down on Lee from northern 
Virginia. So the forces of the Confederacy would be crushed between 
the two great Union armies in Virginia and Georgia. This plan 
of wrapping the Union armies about the Confederacy and squeezing 
the life out of it was called the '^ anaconda policy." It was in view 
of this cooperation of all the Union forces in 1863 that General 
Sherman later wrote, ''The war did not begin professionally until 
after Gettysburg and Vicksburg." 

516. The Battle of Chickamauga. Next to Richmond and Vicks- 
burg the most important military position in the Confederacy was 
Chattanooga. This city, protected by the deep and wide Tennessee 
River on the north and the high ridges of the Appalachian Moun- 
tains on the south, guarded the passes into the rich state of Georgia, 
the "keystone of the Confederacy." Rosecrans, as we have seen, 
confronted Bragg at Chattanooga in the autumn of 1863. Bragg 
retired before his opponent across the Tennessee River into the 
mountains of the northeastern corner of Georgia, then suddenly 
turned on him at Chickamauga Creek, where Rosecrans had hastily 
concentrated his forces. The battle of Chickamauga, which followed 
Rosecrans 's frantic effort to get his army together (September 19-20, 
1863), would have been as complete a disaster for the Union cause 
as Bull Run, had it not been for the intrepid conduct of one man, 
General George H. Thomas. Rosecrans had given a blundering order 
which left a wide gap in the Union lines. Into this gap the Con- 
federate regiments poured, driving the entire right wing of Rose- 
crans's army off the field in a panic and sweeping Rosecrans with 
his men back to Chattanooga, where he telegraphed Halleck that 
his army was "overwhelmed by the enemy." But General Thomas 
on the left, with only 25,000 men, refused to leave the field. Forming 
his men into a convex front like a horseshoe, he stood firm against 
the furious onslaught of 60,000 Confederate troops, from half past 
three in the afternoon till the deep twilight four hours later. It was 






THE CIVIL WAR 



36, 



the most magnificent defensive fighting of the war. It almost turned 
defeat into victory. It earned for General Thomas the proud title 
of the " Rock of Chickamauga " and justified his promotion by 
Grant to the command of the Army of the Cumberland in place 
of Rosecrans. After his dearly bought victory at Chickamauga, 
General Bragg proceeded to lay siege to Chattanooga. 

517. The Fighting around Chattanooga. General Grant, who 
had been put in command of the armies of the West as a reward 
for his capture of Vicksburg, now 
dispatched the Army of the Ten- 
nessee (as the Vicksburg army was 
henceforth called), under General 
Sherman, to join Thomas at Chat- 
tanooga and, by the middle of 
November, was ready with the com- 
bined armies to begin operations 
against Bragg and Johnston. The 
three days' battle around Chatta- 
nooga (November 23-25) was a 
fitting climax to Grant's splendid 
achievements of the year 1863. 
The enthusiasm his presence in- 
spired in the Union army was un- 
bounded. On the twenty-fourth 
of November Hooker seized the 
top of Lookout Mountain in the 

" Battle above the Clouds." On the twenty-fifth General Thomas's 
troops were ordered to seize the Confederate rifle pits at the • 
foot of Missionary Ridge. They seized the pits and then, with- 
out waiting for further orders, stormed up the steep and crum- 
bling sides of the mountain in the face of a deadly fire from thirty 
cannon trained on every path and drove the astounded Bragg, with 
his staff and his choicest infantry, from the crest of the hill.^ The 

1 This impetuous charge of 20,000 Union troops up the sides of Missionary Ridge was 
as dramatic and courageous as the famous cliarge of Pickett's division at Gettysburg. The 
leader of the charge was " Phil " Sheridan, a young Irish general who had distinguished 
himself for bravery in the battles of Perryville and Murfreesboro and who later became the 
most famous cavalry commander in the Union army. The battle of Chattanooga was the 
only one of the war in which the four greatest Union generals — Grant, Sherman, Sheridan 
and Thomas — took part. 




GENERAL PHILIP H. SHERIDAN 



364 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



Confederate general withdrew southward into Georgia with his 
army of 35,000 men, burning his depots and bridges behind him. 

518. Grant raised to the Command of the Army. On the first 
day of the session of Congress, which assembled a fortnight after 
the battle of Chattanooga, Representative Washburne of Illinois 

introduced a bill to re- 
vive the rank of lieu- 
tenant general, which 
had not been held 
by any general in 
the field since George 
Washington. Every- 
body knew that the 
new honor was in- 
tended for General 
Grant. The bill was 
passed February 29, 
1864, and immediately 
Grant was summoned 
to Washington by the 
President and in the 
presence of the cabi- 
net and a few invited 
guests was formally 
invested with the rank 
of lieutenant general 
and the command, 
under the President, 
of all the armies of 
the United States 
(March 9, 1864), Grant made his dear friend and companion in 
arms, General William T. Sherman, his successor in the command of 
the armies of the West, while he established his own headquarters 
with the Army of the Potomac. 

519. Plans of Grant and Sherman, 1864. The plan of campaign 
was now very simple. Sherman, with the armies of the Ohio 
(General Schofield), the Cumberland (General Thomas), and the 
Tennessee (General McPherson), 100,000 strong, was to advance from 




SEAT OF WAR IN EASTERN VIRGINIA 1861-1865 



THE CIVIL WAR 365 

Chattanooga to Atlanta against Joseph E. Johnston, who had suc- 
ceeded Bragg. Grant, with the Army of the Potomac (General Meade 
still nominally in command), was to resume the campaign against 
Richmond, in which McClellan, Pope, Bumside, and Hooker had all 
failed. Both Grant and Sherman greatly outnumbered their oppo- 
nents, Lee and Johnston: but the advantage was not so overwhelming 
as the size of their armies would indicate, for Sherman was to- move 
through a hostile country, with his base of supplies at Louisville, 
Kentucky, hundreds of miles away, and leaving an ever-lengthening 
line of posts to be guarded in his rear ; while Grant was assuming 
the offensive on soil which he had never trodden before, but every 
inch of which was familiar to Lee's veterans of the Army of Northern 
Virginia. 

520. The Wilderness Campaign. On the fourth of May, 1864, 
Grant's army crossed the Rapidan and began to fight its way 
through the Wilderness, where Hooker had been defeated in the battle 
of Chancellorsville just a year earlier. Though his losses were heavy 
(17,500 men in the Wilderness fights), Grant turned his face steadily 
toward Richmond. " I propose to fight it out on this line," he wrote 
Halleck, "if it takes all summer."^ At Cold Harbor (June 3) he 
attacked Lee's strongly fortified position in front and lost 7000 men 
in an hour, in an assault almost as rash as Burnside's at Fredericks- 
burg.^ After this awful battle, Grant led the Army of the Potomac 
down to the James River to renew the attack on Richmond from 
the south. In the Wilderness campaign of forty days, from the 
Rapidan to the James, Grant had lost 55,000 men (almost as many 

1 His men were with him, too, keyed to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. The writer has 
heard from the Hps of one of the members of Company A of the Twelfth Massachusetts 
regiment the thriUing story of the resumption of the march southward after the terrible 
losses in the Wilderness. The orders to move came one stormy evening, just as the heavy 
clouds were parting, and the soldiers were uncertain whether the column was headed north- 
ward in retreat or southward for Richmond. As they came out upon an open road and were 
greeted by the stars, the shout came from the head of the column, " Boys, we are leaving the 
North Star behind us 1 " "I have heard the army cheer after victory," said the veteran, " but 
I have never heard cheering like that which swept down the marching column then." 

- Horace Porter, an aid-de-camp of General Grant, tells in the Century Magazine for 
March, 1S97, how the Union soldiers were seen the night before the terrible assault at Cold 
Harbor quietly pinning on the backs of their coats slips of paper with their name and 
address, so that their bodies might be taken back to their families in the North. Grant him- 
self confesses in his " Memoirs," written nearly twenty years after the battle, that " no 
advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss which we sustained." The 
attack at Cold Harbor was a serious mistake on Grant's part. 



366 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



as Lee had in his entire army), but he had at least shown Lee the 
novel sight of a Union commander who did not retreat when he was 
repulsed or rest when he was victorious. 

521. Sherman takes Atlanta. Sherman left Chattanooga two 
days after Grant crossed the Rapidan (May 6). Mile by mile 
he forced Johnston back until by the middle of July he was in 
sight of Atlanta. Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston by Hood, but 




From the '" Photojfraphic History of the Civil War." Copyright by Patriot Publishing Company 
THE CONFEDERATE TRENCHES BEFORE ATLANTA 



it was of no avail. Sherman beat Hood in several engagements be- 
fore Atlanta and entered the city on the third of September, 1864. 

522. The Presidential Campaign of 1864. While Grant was 
fighting his way through the Wilderness, and Sherman was slowly 
advancing on Atlanta, the national conventions met to nominate 
candidates for the presidential election of 1864. Secretary Chase 
was ambitious for the Republican nomination. When a circular 
recommending his candidacy appeared in the press, he confessed his 
ambition to Lincoln, who generously refused to consider it a reason 
for removing Chase from the head of the Treasury Department. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



367 



Chase was a very able man, — ''about one and a half times bigger 
than any other man I've known," Lincoln said once, — but he was 
also very pompous and conceited and needed little persuasion to 
believe that he was indispensable to the country's salvation. His 
surprise and chagrin were, therefore, great when his canvass fell 
flat. He withdrew in February, and on June 8 Lincoln was nomi- 
nated by the convention at Baltimore.^ The Democrats met at 




ADMIRAL FARRAGUT ATTACKING THE FORTS IN MOBILE HARBOR 



Chicago (August 29) and nominated General McClellan, recom- 
mending in their platform that '' after four years of failure to restore 
the Union by the experiment of war . . . immediate efforts be made 
for the cessation of hostilities . . . and peace be restored on the basis 
of the federal union of the states."- 

1 Chase harbored some ill will toward the administration and on June 29 resigned his 
secretaryship rather petulantly. Lincoln accepted the resignation, but showed his utter 
magnanimity by nominating Chase to the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court 
(December 6, 1864), made vacant by the death of the aged Roger B. Taney. This gracious 
act drew from Chase a beautiful letter of gratitude. 

2 It is only fair to say that McClellan did not consent to the platform which declared the 
war a "failure."' Nevertheless it is little credit to him, who was once in command of the 
United States armies and supported by Lincoln to the utmost of the President's ability, to 
be now associated with a party that was trying to discredit the war and " push Lincoln from 
his throne." 



368 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



523. The Reelection of Lincoln. All through the summer of 
1864 there wa5 doubt and discouragement in the Republican ranks. 
Grant's Wilderness campaign brought no comfort to the administra- 
tion. Lincoln himself at one period had no hope of being reelected. 
But the autumn brought changes in the Unionist fortunes. In 
August, Admiral Farragut sailed into the harbor of Mobile, Alabama, 
by an exploit as daring as the running of the New Orleans forts, 
and deprived the Confederacy of its last stronghold on the Gulf 
of Mexico. In September, Sherman entered Atlanta after a four 
months' campaign against Johnston and Hood. And in October, 

Sheridan, by his wonderful ride up the 
Shenandoah valley, "from Winchester 
twenty miles away," literally turned 
defeat into victory and saved Washing- 
ton from the raid of General Early's 
cavalry. These Union victories were 
the most powerful campaign arguments 
for the Republican cause. "Sherman 
and Farragut," cried Seward, "have 
knocked the bottom out of the Chicago 
platform." Lincoln was reelected in 
November by an electoral vote of 212 
to 21 and a popular majority of nearly 
500,000. The election meant the in- 
dorsement by the people of the North 
of Lincoln's policy of continuing the war until the South recognized 
the supremacy throughout the United States of the national govern- 
ment at Washington. 

524. Sherman's March to the Sea. When Atlanta fell, Hood, 
thinking to draw Sherman back from further invasion of Georgia, 
and at the same time to regain Tennessee, made a dash northward 
against Thomas, who had been left to protect Nashville and Chatta- 
nooga, Sherman trusted the reliable Thomas to take care of Ten- 
nessee and, boldly severing all connection with his base of supplies, 
started on his famous march " from Atlanta to the sea," 300 miles 
across the state of Georgia. He met with no resistance. The march 
through Georgia was more like a continuous picnic of three months 
for his 60,000 troops than like a campaign. They lived on the fat 




GENERAL WILLIAM T. 
SHERMAN 



THE CIVIL WAR 369 

♦ 

of the land, — the newly gathered harvests of corn and grain, abun- 
dance of chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigs, and sweet potatoes. Sherman 
entered on the march with a grim determination to make the state 
of Georgia "an example to rebels," and he carried out his threat. 
Railroads were torn up, public buildings, depots, and machine shops 
burned, stores of cotton destroyed, 10,000 mules and horses taken, 
and the military resources of the state damaged beyond repair.^ 
Reaching the coast in December, Sherman easily broke through the 
weak defenses of Savannah, and on Christmas evening President 
Lincoln read a telegram from him announcing "as a Christmas gift 
the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns, plenty of ammunition, 
and about 25,000 bales of cotton." 

525. Thomas's Victory at Nashville. Meanwhile the complete 
success of Sherman's campaign was insured by the failure of Hood's 
plan to dislodge Thomas from Nashville. For had Hood retaken 
Tennessee and driven Thomas back into Kentucky, he might have 
turned eastward rapidly and, summoning the Carolinas to his 
banners, have confronted Sherman with a most formidable army 
barring his march north from Savannah. But Thomas was equal 
to the occasion. On the fifteenth of December, before Nashville. 
he almost annihilated Hood's army and drove the remnants out of 
Tennessee. The battle of Nashville was the deathblow of the Con- 
federacy west of the Alleghenies. Virginia and the Carolinas alone 
were left to be subdued. 

526. The Hampton Roads Conference. Before the campaign of 
1865 opened, there was an attempt to close the war by diplomacy. 
Vice President Stephens of the Confederacy, with two other commis- 
sioners, met Lincoln and Seward on board a United States vessel, at 
Hampton Roads (February 3) to discuss terms of peace. But as 
Lincoln would listen to no terms whatever except on the basis of a 
reunited country, the conference came to naught. 

1 Sherman has been execrated by Southern writers for the " barbarity " of his soldiers 
during this march through Georgia ; and it is certain that much irregular plundering and 
thieving were done, such as taking jewelry from women, burning private houses, and wantonly 
insulting the feelings of the inhabitants. Sherman's chief of cavalry, Kilpatrick, was a coarse 
and brutal man, who was responsible for much of the damage. Then a crowd of " bummers " 
followed the army, out of the reach of Sherman's officers. Although Sherman was severe in 
this march, it must be said to his credit that he gave orders to have private property respected, 
and there is no complaint of his soldiers' treating defenceless women as the armies of 
European conquerors were accustomed to do. 



370 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

527. The Fall of Richmond. In March, 1865, the Army of the 
Potomac renewed its operations against Richmond. The strong- 
hold of Petersburg, to the south of the city, fell on Sunday, April 2. 
Jefferson Davis was at worship in St. Paul's church in Richmond 
when news was brought to his pew, by a messenger from the War 
Department, that the city could no longer "be held. Hastily collect- 
ing his papers, he left Richmond for Danville at eleven o'clock the 
same night, with his cabinet and several of his staff officers. On the 
third of April the Union troops entered the city, followed the next day 
by President Lincoln, who spoke only words of conciliation and kind- 
ness in " the enemy's capital." Lee, with his dwindling army, moved 
westward toward the mountains, but Grant followed him hard, while 
Sheridan's cavalry encircled his forces. On the seventh of April, 
the Union commander wrote to Lee: ^^ General — The result of the 
last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance 
on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia." Brought to a stand- 
still, Lee consented to listen to Grant's terms for surrender. 

528. Lee's Surrender at Appomattox. The two great generals 
met in a farmhouse at Appomattox, on the ninth of April, 1865. After 
a few minutes of courteous conversation recalling the days of their 
old comradeship in arms in the INIexican War, Grant wrote out the 
terms of surrender. They were generous, as befitted the reconciliation 
of brother Americans. The Army of Northern Virginia was to lay 
down its arms, but the officers were to retain their horses and side 
arms, and even the cavalrymen and artillerymen were to be allowed to 
keep their horses. "They will need them for the spring plowing," 
said Grant, with his wonderful simplicity. Lee accepted the terms 
with sorrowing gratitude and surrendered his army of 26,765 men.^ 
When the Union soldiers heard the good news they began to fire 
salutes, but Grant stopped them, saying, " The war is over ; the 
rebels are our countrymen again." Lee had hinted that his men 
were hungry, and Grant immediately ordered the distribution of 

• 25,000 rations to the Confederate army. 

1 As Lee rode back to his army after the conference with Grant, the soldiers crowded 
around him, blessing him. Tears came to his eyes as he made his farewell address of three 
brief sentences : " We have fought through the war together. I have done the best I could 
for you. My heart is too full to say more." At the close of the war this noble and heroic 
man accepted the presidency of Washington College in Virginia, which he served with 
■devotion for the five years of life that remained to him. 



^ A^te^t^ ^2d<^«, (^^io^ ^^^<rdlir 
ffuJ XiA,,^^^^^ (Uaha^ /U/ik^ (Yr^ ^^ 

lee's letter to grant respecting the surrender of the 
confederate army of northern virginia 



372 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



i 






'VammmmaeimmammBBmsiuam'Sm:. 



529. The Collapse of the Confederacy. With the fall of Rich- 
mond and the surrender of Lee's army the Confederacy collapsed.^ 
It is a marvel that it fought through the last year of the war. For 
the South was brought to the point of actual destitution. The paper 
money which the Confederacy issued had depreciated so much that 

it took $1900 to buy a barrel of 
flour and $30 to buy a pound of 
tea. Its credit was dead in Eu- 
rope and its bonds were worthless. 
When the blockade of their ports 
stopped the export of cotton, the 
Southerners planted their fields 
with corn and grain. But the lack 
of means of transportation made 
it almost impossible to distribute 
the products of the farms to the 
soldiers at the front. While Sher- 
man's army was reveling in the 
abundance of the farms and har- 
vests of central Georgia, the knap- 
sacks found on the poor fellows 
who fell in the defense of Rich- 
mond contained only scanty 
rations of corn bread and bacon. 
The women of the South, accus- 
tomed to handsome dress and 
dainty fare, wore homespun gowns 
and cheap rough boots and cheer- 
fully ate porridge and drank "cof- 
fee" made of roasted sweet 
potatoes. They knew no hardships but the failure of fathers and 
brothers and sons in battle ; they were visited by no calamities 
except the presence of the "Yankee" soldier. It is impossible for 

1 Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army of 37,000 men to Sherman near Durham, 
North Carolina, on April 26 : Generals Taylor in Alabama and Kirby Smith in Arkansas 
turned over the armies under their command to the Union officers in the South and Southwest. 
In all 174,000 Confederate soldiers laid down their arms at the close of the war. Jefferson 
Davis was captured on May 10 at Irwinville, Georgia, and imprisoned two years at Fortress 
Monroe. After his release he lived quietly in the South till his death, December 6, 1889. 




vm'i i)tj}j ]iiim0^fSwilg^!i0^W^^^^ 



THE HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM 
LINCOLN DIED 

Now used as a Lincoln Museum 



THE CIVIL WAR 373 

the student of history today to feel otherwise than that the victory 
of the South in 1861-1865 would have been a calamity for every 
section of our country. But the indomitable valor and utter self- 
sacrifice with which the South defended her cause both at home and 
in the field must always arouse our admiration. 

Friday, the fourteenth of April, 1865, was a memorable day in our 
history. It was the fourth anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter. 
A great celebration was held at Charleston, and General Robert 
Anderson raised above the fort the selfsame tattered flag which he had 
hauled down after Beauregard's bombardment in 1861. William Lloyd 
Garrison was present. Flowers were strewn in his path by the lib- 
erated slaves. He spoke at the banquet held that evening in Charles- 
ton, and the echoes of his voice reached a grave over which stood 
a marble stone engraved with the single word '"■ Calhoun." 

530. The Assassination of President Lincoln. On the evening of 
the same day President Lincoln was sitting in a box at Ford's theater 
in Washington, with his wife and two guests, when a miserable, half- 
crazy actor named Wilkes Booth stepped into the box and shot the 
President in the back of the head.^ Lincoln was carried unconscious 
to a private house across the street and medical aid was summoned. 
But the precious life, the most precious of the land and of the cen- 
tury, was ebbing fast. Early in the morning of the fifteenth of April, 
surrounded by his prostrated family and official friends, Abraham 
Lincoln died. He had brought the storm-tossed ship of state safely 
into port. The exultant shores were ringing with the people's shouts 
of praise and rejoicing. But in the hour of victory the great Captain 
lay upon the deck — "fallen cold and dead."- 

Words have no power to tell the worth of Abraham Lincoln. 
His name, linked with the immortal Washington's, is forever en- 
shrined in the hearts of the American people, for he was the savior of 
our country as Washington was its founder and father. 

1 The assassination of Lincoln was part of a deep-laid plot to kill several of the high 
officers of the Union. Secretary Seward, who was abed suffering from injuries received in a 
runaway accident, was stabbed severely the same night, and his son Frederick was injured 
while defending his father's life. Both men recovered. Grant w^as proscribed also, but the 
assassin lost courage apparently after gazing into the general's carriage window. The wretch 
Booth fell to the stage in trying to escape, and broke his leg. He was soon caught in a bam 
in Virginia and was shot after the barn had been set on fire. 

2 Every student should learn by heart Walt Whitman's superb elegy on Lincoln, 
"O Captain! my Captain I " See Muzzey's "Readings in American History," p. 445. 



374 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

Our children shall behold his fame, 
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American.^ 

Stanton, the great Secretary of War, pronounced Abraham Lin- 
coln's best eulogy, when he stood with streaming eyes by the bedside 
of the martyred President and murmured with choking voice, " Now 
he belongs to the ages." 

Emancipation 

531. The Purpose of the War. Although slavery was the cause of 
the Civil War, both the North and the South insisted that the war 
•was not begun on account of slavery. The South declared that it 
was fighting for its constitutional rights, ^enied by a hostile majority 
in Congress and destroyed by the election of a purely sectional presi- 
dent ; while the^ North, with equal emphasis, insisted that it took 
up arms not to free the slaves but to preserve the Union. Lincoln 
thought slavery a great moral, social, and political evil, and never 
hesitated to say so ; but he repeatedly declared that neither the presi- 
dent nor Congress had any right to interfere with slavery in those 
states where it was established by law, and assured the South that 
lie would not attack their institution so long as it was confined to 
those states. The day after the disaster at Bull Run (July 21, 1861), 
l)oth branches of Congress passed a resolution to the effect that 
"this war is not waged ... in any spirit of oppression, or for any 
purpose of conquest or subjugation, or of overthrowing or interfering 
with the rights or established institutions of those [seceding] states, 
but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution." 

532. Slaves treated as "Contraband." It soon became evi- 
dent that the slaves were a valuable war asset to the South, and 
Congress began to treat them as ''property" which could be con- 
fiscated. In a series of acts beginning in August, 1861, Congress 
declared that all negroes employed in a military capacity by the 
South, as workers on forts or trenches or in the transportation of 
stores or ammunition, should be liberated; that slaves of "rebel" 

1 James Russell Lowell's " Commemoration Ode," read at the memorial services for 
Harvard men who fell in the war (July 21, 1865). 



THE CIVIL WAR 375 

owners escaping to the Union lines should not be returned; and that 
all slaves in places conquered and held by the Union armies should be 
free. Two generals in the field went even further than Congress. 
Fremont in Missouri and Hunter in South Carolina, on their own 
responsibility, issued military proclamations emancipating slaves in 
the districts subject to their authority. 

533. Lincoln's Views on Emancipation. President Lincoln 
signed the Confiscation Acts of Congress with reluctance and im- 
mediately disavowed and annulled the proclamations of Fremont 
and Hunter, to the great disappointment of thousands of radical 
antislavery men of the North. To preserve and cherish the Union 
sentiment in the loyal slaveholding states of Kentucky, Missouri, 
and Maryland seemed to him the most immediate duty of his ad- 
ministration. If he could get these border states to lead the way 
in the peaceful emancipation of their slaves, he was in hopes that 
their example would prevail with the states in secession further 
south. At any rate, he was sure that any hasty measures for negro 
emancipation, either by Congress or by the military authorities, 
would drive these border slave states into the Confederacy and make 
more difficult the task of preserving the Union. Accordingly the 
President, in a special message to Congress, March 6, 1862, recom- 
mended that a law be passed pledging the United States government 
to cooperate with any state in the emancipation of its slaves by 
compensating the owners of the slaves for their loss. He invited 
the congressmen of the border states to a conference and urged them 
to contribute their valuable aid toward preserving the Union by the 
acceptance of this plan of " compensated emancipation." But they 
hung back, doubting the power or the will of the government to deal 
fairly with them. Lincoln got little support, either from his 
cabinet or from Congress, in spite of repeated efforts, and he sorrow- 
fully gave up the realization of this wise and humane policy of eman- 
cipation (July, 1862).^ 

1 It is doubtful in the extreme if the adoption of Lincoln's plan by the border states would 
have had any effect on the seceding states or shortened the war a day. The failure of the 
plan, however, was about the keenest political disappointment in Lincoln's life. The slaves 
in the four border states of Delaware, IMarj'land, Kentucky, and Missouri numbered 430,000, 
and at Ji400 apiece their emancipation would have cost the government about J^i 75,000,000, 
or the cost of eighty-seven days of war. Lincoln had no doubt that the emancipation of these 
slaves would shorten the war by more than eighty-seven days, but one sees no ground for 
such confidence. 



376 THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

534. Slavery abolished in the Territories. Meanwhile Congress 
had passed an* act in April abolishing slavery in the District of 
Columbia, with a compensation to the owner of $300 for each slave 
liberated ; and two months later fulfilled the pledges of the platform 
on which Lincoln was elected, by prohibiting slavery in all the ter- 
ritories of the United States and in all territory which might be 
acquired by the United States in the future (June 19, 1862). 

535. Pressure exerted on Lincoln to free the Slaves. After the 
failure of the border states to accept the compensated-emancipation 
scheme, the President grew more favorable to the idea of mili- 
tary emancipation. The pressure brought to bear on him to liberate 
the slaves was enormous. The radical antislavery men of the North 
wanted to know how long the evil which had brought on the war 
was to be tolerated,^ and our ministers abroad were writing home 
that the sympathy of Europe could not be expected by the North 
until it was clear that the war was for the extermination of slavery 
and not for the subjugation of the South. At the cabinet meeting 
of July 22, 1862, therefore, President Lincoln read a paper announc- 
ing his intention of declaring free, on the first of the following 
January, the slaves of all people then in rebellion^ against the au- 
thority of the United States. The members of the cabinet approved 
the paper, but Seward suggested that the moment was inopportune 
for its publication. McClellan had just been removed from his com- 
mand after the futile Peninsular campaign, and the new generals, 
Halleck and Pope, were as yet untried in the East. Would it not 
be better to wait for a Union victory before publishing the proclama- 
tion ? Lincoln agreed with Seward and put the paper in his desk. 

536. The Emancipation Proclamation. The dark days of the 
second Bull Run and Pope's retreat followed (August, 1862); but 
when McClellan repulsed Lee's invasion of INIaryland at Antietam 
Creek (September 16), Lincoln thought that the favorable moment 
had come. Accordingly he published the warning announcement, 

1 Horace Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune, wrote an editorial in 
August, 1862, which he called the Prayer of Twenty Millions, taking the President severely 
to task for his " mistaken deference to rebel slavery " and calling on him to execute the 
Confiscation Acts immediately. Lincoln replied in a famous letter, in which he declared that 
he was acting as seemed best to him for the preservation of the Union. That was his " para- 
mount object." " If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and 
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. , . . What I do about slavery and the 
colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union." 



THE CIVIL WAR 377 

September 22, 1862, and on New Year's Day, 1863, issued the 
famous Emancipation Proclamation, designating the states and parts 
of states in which rebellion against the authority and government 
of the United States then existed, and declaring, by virtue of the 
power vested in him as commander in chief of the army and navy of 
the United States, that ''all persons held as slaves within said 

t/^huit ^ /irCCt^ <w^^^ X<n.A«/y <a-»N«6/^^ ;^?^ yW/^ru/ «^ 

FACSIMILE OF THE CLOSING WORDS OF THE EMANCIPATION 

PROCLAMATION 

designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall 
be free." This immortal proclamation is one of the landmarks of 
universal history. It announced the liberation of three and a half 
million slaves. It changed the status of nearly one eighth of the' 
inhabitants of this country from that of chattels who could be bought 
and sold in the auction market to that of men and women endowed 
with the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" — the 
right to labor, like other human beings, for employers whom they 
chose and under terms to which they agreed. 




378 



THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 



537. The proclamation a War Measure. But splendid as this 
proclamation was, it was nevertheless only a war measure. While 
the President as commander in chief of the army could confiscate 
the "property" of men in rebellion against the government, by de- 
claring their slaves free, neither he nor Congress could permanently 
alter the constitutions of the states. Slavery was legally established 
in the states south of Mason and Dixon's line, and the only way 
it could be permanently abolished in those states was either by the 




^J" By Lincoln's Proclamat'ion Jan.'l, l"863 t 1 

By Action of the States 1863-1865 K?snx| 

Bv Thirteenth Amendment 186.5 I:- - I 




ilOW THE SLAVES WERE EMANCIPATED 



action of the states themselves or by an amendment to the Con- 
stitution of the United States. Lincoln's proclamation did not free 
a single slave in the loyal slaveholding states of Kentucky, Mis- 
souri, Maryland, and Delaware. And v/hen the seceded states should 
cease to be " in rebellion against the authority of the United States," 
there was nothing to hinder their legislatures from passing laws to 
re-enslave the negroes. In order to have emancipation permanent, 
then, the Constitution must be amended so as to prohibit slavery 
in the whole of the United States. 

538. The Thirteenth Amendment. An amendment providing 
that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punish- 
ment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, 
shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their 



THE CIVIL WAR 379 

jurisdiction,"^ was passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, 
by the necessary two-thirds vote, amid great enthusiasm, and 
the House adjourned "in honor of the immortal and subhme i 
event." The amendment was duly ratified by three fourths of the | 
states, including eight of the states of the late Confederacy, 
and on December 18, 1865, was proclaimed part of the Constitu- 
tion of the United States, the supreme law of the land. Whether 
slavery could have been removed from our land without war is 
a question no one can answer. Certain it is that before the war, 
iif^pit^^^fpdi^ical compromises of forty years, in spite of the 
labors of the greatest statesmen and orators to preserve concord 
between the North and the South, in spite of the mobs that assaulted 
the abolitionists in Boston and the voices that rebuked the " fire 
eaters " in Charleston, the argument over slavery grew more and 
more bitter each year. When we consider that the thirteenth amend- 
ment to our Constitution might have been the prohibition of Congress 
ever to disturb slavery in the Southern states,^ instead of the eternal 
banishment of slavery from our land, we may say that the awful 
sacrifices of the Civil War were not made in vain. 

References 

The Opposing Forces: J. K. Hosmer, The Appeal to Arms (American 
Nation Series), ciiaps. i-iii; T. A. Dodge, A Bird's-eye View of the Civil War, 
chaps, ii, xxv; J. C. Ropes, Story of the Civil War, Vol. I, chaps, vii, viii; 
W. E. DoDD, The Cotton Kingdom (Chronicles, Vol. XXVII) ; F. L. Paxson, The 
Civil War, chap iv; A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, 
Vol. rV, Nos. 75-83 ; J. W. Draper, .The Civil War in America, Vol. II, chaps, 
xxxvii-xxxix ; Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, Vol. I, 
part iv, chaps, i-iv. 

From Bull Run to Gettysburg: Hosmer, chaps, iv-xiii, xv-xix; Dodge, 
chaps, iv-xxvi; Ropes, Vol. I, chaps, ix-xii; Vol. II, chaps, i-vii; Draper, 

1 Of course the exception in the middle of the amendment refers to the labor of convicts 
in prisons or workhouses. The amendment was violated when we acquired the Philippine 
Islands in 189S, for slavery existed on some of those islands, though they were "under the 
jurisdiction" of the United States. But it was a condition which we inherited with the 
Islands and which we have largely remedied since. 

- The student will remember that Congress, in the last hope of preventing the war, 
actually passed an amendment, Februan,' 28, 1S61, to the effect that Congress should never 
have " the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, 
inchiding that of persons held to labor or setvice by the laws of said state'''' (see page 329, note 2), 
^Before the amendment had a fair chance to secure ratification by the states the war had 
broken out. 



38o THE CRISIS OF DISUNION 

Vol. II, chaps. xlix-lLx; Paxson, chaps, v-viii; U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 
Vol. I, chaps, xx-xxxix; J. W. Burgess, The Civil War and the Constitution, 
Vol. I, chaps, viii-xi; Vol. II, chaps, xii-xxv; J. F. Rhodes, History of the 
Civil War, chaps, i-v; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, a History, Vols. 
III-VII. 

The Triumph of the North: N. W. Stephenson, The Day of the Con- 
federacy (Chronicles, Vol. XXX), chaps, v-xii; Nicolay and Hay, Vols. VIII-X; 
HosMER, chaps, i-xiii, xvii; Paxson, chaps, ix-xii; Rhodes, chaps, vi-xiv; 
Burgess, Vol. II, chaps, xxvi-xxxii; Dodge, chaps, xxvii-xl; Draper, Vol. Ill; 
Grant, Vol. II. 

Emancipation: Nicolay and Hay, Vol. IV, chaps, xxii, xxiv; Vol. VI, 
chaps. V, vi, viii, xix; Vol. X, chap, iv; Hosmer, chap, xiv; Davis, Vol. 
II, part iv, chaps, xxv, xxvi; Hart, Salmon P. Chase, chap, x; Co7iteni- 
porarics, Vol. IV, Nos. 124-131; Burgess, Vol. II, chaps, xvi, xviii, xx; 
Draper, Vol. II, chap. Lxiv; J. G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. I, 
chap. XX ; Horace Greeley, The American Conflict, Vol. II, chaps, xi, xii. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Blockade of the Southern Coast: Nicolay and Hay, Vol. V, pp. 
1-20; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. IV, No. 116; E. S. Maclay, History of the 
United States Navy, Vol. II, pp. 225-281; J. R. Soley, The Blockade and the 
Cruisers; H. L. Wait, The Blockade of the Confederacy {Century Magazine, 
Vol. XXXIV, pp. 914-928). 

2. Great Britain's Attitude during the War: Rhodes, pp. 261-286; T. K. 
LoTHROP, William H. Seivard, pp. 271-287, 320-336; C. F. Adams, Charles 
Francis Adams, pp. 147-344; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. IV, No. 98; Hosmer, 
The Appeal to Arms, pp. 306-319; Montague Bernard, The Neutrality of 
Great Britain. 

3. Vicksburg during the Siege: Hart, Vol. IV, No. 119; Nicolay and 
Hay, Vol. VIII, pp. 2S2-310; Rhodes, History of the United States from the 
Compromise of 1850, Vol. IV, pp. 312-318; My Cave Life in Vicksburg, by a 
Lady (New York, 1864). 

4. The Draft Riots in New York: Nicolay and Hay, Vol. VII, pp. 1-27; 
Rhodes, Vol. IV, pp. 320-332; Greeley, Vol. II, pp. 500-508; Hart, Vol. IV, 
No. 121; Harper's Magazine, Vol. XXVII, pp. SS9-560; J. B. Frye, New York 
and the Conscription of 1863. 

5. The Economic and Social Condition of the South during the War: 
Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 141-144; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, pp. 603- 
621; Draper, Vol. Ill, pp. 4S0-496; Stephenson, pp. 99-111; Woodrow Wil- 
son, History of the American People, Vol. IV, pp. 290-312; Davis, Vol. I, pp. 
471-504; David Dodge, The Cave Dwellers of the Confederacy (Atlantic 
Monthly, Vol. LVIII, pp. 514-521). 

6. Prisons, North and South: Nicol.\y and Hay, Vol. VII, pp. 444-472; 
Rhodes, Vol. V, pp. 483-515; Draper, Vol. Ill, pp. 498-520; Hosmer, The 
Outcome of the War, pp. 240-248; A. B. Isham, Prisoners of War and Military 
Prisons; J. V. Hadley, Seven Months a Prisoner. 



PART VIL THE POLITICAL AND IN- 
DUSTRIAL HISTORY OF THE REPUB- 
LIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

CHAPTER XVH 

TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 

Reconstruction 

539. Andrew Johnson President. A few hours after Lincoln's 
death, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took the oath of office as presi- 
dent of the United States (April 15, 1865). Johnson had been 
given the second place on the Republican ticket in 1864 not by 
reason of any fitness to occupy high office, but partly to reward him 
for his fidelity to the Union cause in the seceding state of Tennessee 
(p. 352, note 2) and partly to save the Republican party from 
the reproach of being called " sectional " in again choosing both 
its candidates from Northern states, as it had done in 1856 and i860. 
But the selection of Johnson was most unfortunate. He was coarse, 
violent, egotistical, obstinate, and vindictive. Of Lincoln's splendid 
array of statesmanlike virtues he possessed only two, honesty and 
patriotism. Tact, wisdom, magnanimity, deference to the opinion of 
others, patience, kindness, humor — all these qualities he lacked ; 
and he lacked them at a crisis in our history when they were sorely 
needed. 

540. The Problem of Reconstruction, Armed resistance in the 
South was at an end. But the great question remained of how the 
North should use its victory. Except for a momentary wave of desire 
to avenge Lincoln's murder by the execution of prominent '^ rebels," 
there was no thought of inflicting on the Southern leaders the extreme 
punishment of traitors;' but there was the difficult problem of 

1 Jefferson Davis was brought from his prison at Fortress Monroe to the federal court at 
Richmond to answer the charge of treason. But he was released on bail, and the case was 
never pressed. 

3R1 



382 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

restoring the states of the secession to their proper place in the Union. 
What was their condition ? Were they still states of the Union, in 
spite of their four years' struggle to break away from it ? Or had 
they lost the rights of states and become territories of the United 
States, subject to such governments as might be provided for them 
by the authorities at Washington? Or was the South merely a 
"conquered province," which had forfeited even the right to be 
considered a part of the country and which might be made to sub- 
mit to such terms as the conquering North saw fit to impose ? 

541. Lincoln's 10 Per Cent Plan. Long before the close of the 
war President Lincoln had answered these questions according to 
the theory he had held consistently from the day of the assault on 
Fort Sumter; namely, that__not the statea themselves, but combina- 
tions of individuals in the states, too powerful to be dealt with by 
the ordinary process of the courts, had resisted the authority of the 
United States. He had therefore welcomed and nursed every mani- 
festation of loyalty in the Southern states. He had recognized the 
representatives of the small Unionist population of Virginia, as- 
sembled at Alexandria within the Federal lines, as the true govern- 
ment of the state. He had immediately established a military 
government in Tennessee on the success of the Union arms there in 
the spring of 1862. He had declared by a proclamation in December, 
1863, that as soon as 10 per cent of the voters of i860 in any of 
the seceded states should form a loyal government and accept the 
legislation of Congress and the proclamations of the President on the 
subject of slavery, he would recognize that government as legal. 
And such governments had actually been set up in Tennessee, 
Arkansas, and Louisiana. True, Lincoln had not come to an agree- 
ment with Congress as to the final method of restoring the Southern 
states to their place in the Union.^ That question waited till the 
close of the war ; and the pity is that when it came Abraham Lincoln 
was no longer alive. 

1 Congress admitted only two representatives from Louisiana from these " Lincoln gov- 
ernments " and in 1S64 passed the Wade-Davis bill prescribing conditions on which the 
seceding states should be readmitted to the Union. Lincoln, unwilling to have so weighty 
a question decided hastily, allowed the Congress of 1864 to expire without giving the bill 
his signature. Wade and Davis protested against this " usurpation of authority " by the 
executive ; and there is no doubt that, if Lincoln had been spared to serve his second term, 
he would have had to use all his tact and patience in finding a fair ground of agreement 
between the President and Congress in the reconstruction of the Southern states. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 383 

542. The "Johnson Governments." During the summer and 
autumn of 1865, when Congress was not in session, President John- 
son proceeded to apply Lincoln's plan to the states of the South. He 
appointed military governors in North and South Carolina, Georgia, 
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, jje ordered conventions 
to be held in those states, which repealed the ordinances of secession 
and framed new constitutions.' State officers were elected. Legis- 
latures were chosen, which repudiated the debts incurred during the 
war (except in South Carolina) and ratified the Thirteenth Amend- 
ment abolishing slavery (except in Mississippi), ^hen Congress 
met in December, 1865, senators and representatives from all the 
states of the secession (except Florida and Texas^) were waiting at 
the doors of the Capitol for admission to their seats. But Congress 
was opposed to the recognition of the Johnson governments. In 
the first place, the President had arrogated to himself, during the 
recess of Congress, the sole right to determine on what terms the 
seceded states should be restored to the Union, as if it were simply 
a question of the exercise of his power of pardon; whereas, Con-i 
gress maintained that the relation of states to the Union was a 
question for it to decide itself. 

543. The "Black Codes." Furthermore, the conduct of the John- 
son governments in the autumn and winter of 1 865-1 866 was 
offensive to the North. Although they accepted the Thirteenth 
Amendment, they passed ^^ vagrancy " laws imposing a fine on negroes 
who were wandering about without a domicile, and allowing the man 
who paid the fine to take the negro and compel him to work out his 
debt; and '^apprentice" laws assigning young negroes to "guardians" 
(often their former owners), for whom they should work without 
wages in return for their board and clothing. The North regarded these 
laws as a defiant determination to thrust the negro back into slavery. 
But to the Southerners they were only the necessary protection of 
the white population against the deeds of crime and violence to which 
a large, wandering, unemployed body of negroes might be tempted. 
Nearly 4,000,000 slaves had been suddenly liberated. Very few of 
them had any sense of responsibility or any capacity or capital for 
beginning a life of industrial freedom. Their-^emotional nature led 

1 The Johnson government in Texas did not get organized until 1866, and the Florida 
legislature had not met to choose the senators from that state. 



384 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

them to believe that miraculous prosperity was to be bestowed upon 
them without their effort ; that the plantations of their late masters 
were to be divided among them as Christmas and New Year's 
gifts, and that every negro was to have " forty acres and a mule." 
They were unfortunately encouraged in these ideas by many low- 
minded adventurers and rascally, broken-down politicians, who came 
from the North and posed as the guides and protectors of the colored 
race,^ poisoning the minds of the negroes against- the only people 
who could really help them begin their new life of freedom well, 
— their old masters. 

544. The South sends its Leaders to Congress. A further of- 
fense in the eyes of the North was the sort of men whom the South- 
ern states sent up to Washington in the winter of 1865 to take their 
places in Congress. They were mostly prominent secessionists. 
Some had served as members of the Confederate Congress at Rich- 
mond ; some as brigadier generals in the Confederate army. Alex- 
ander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, was sent by 
the legislature of Georgia to serve in the United States Senate. To the 
Southerners it seemed perfectly natural to send their best talent 
to Congress. The}^ would have searched in vain to find statesmen 
who had not been active in the Confederate cause. But to the North 
the appearance of these men in Washington seemed a piece of de- 
fiance and bravado on the part of the South ; a boast that they 
had nothing to repent of, and that they had forfeited no privilege 
of leadership. Furthermore, these men were almost all Democrats, 
and as hostile to the " Black Republican" party as they had been in 
1856 and i860. Combined with the Democrats and "copperheads" 
of the North, who had opposed the war, they might prove numerous 
enough to oust the Republicans from power. The party which had 
saved the country must rule it, said the Republican orators. 

1 These men were called " carpetbaggers," because they were popularly said to have 
brought all their property with them in the cheap kind of valise which in those days was 
made of carpet material ; and the Southerners who acted with them in their attempt to raise 
the negro above his former master in society and politics were called "scalawags." The 
carpetbaggers and scalawags were of course working for their own profit and political 
advancement. They must not be confused with the many good men and women who went 
South to work solely for the education, protection, and uplift of the negro. Before the close 
of the war Congress had established a Freedman's Bureau in the War Department (March 
3, 1865), whose duty it was to look after the interests of the emancipated blacks, securing 
them labor contracts, settling their disputes, aiding them to build cottages, etc. The carpet- 
basrgers tempted the negroes away from industrial pursuits into politics. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 385 

545. Johnson quarrels with Congress. Moved by these reasons 
Congress, instead of admitting the Southern members, appointed a 
committee of fifteen to investigate the condition of the late seceded 
states and to recommend on what terms they should be restored to 
their full privileges in the Union. Naturally, Johnson was offended 
that Congress should ignore or undo his work ; and he immediately 
assumed a tone of hostility to the leaders of Congress. He had the 
coarseness, when making a speech from the balcony of the White 
TTdiise on Washington's birthday, 1866, to attack Sumner, Phillips, 
and Stevens ^ by name, accusing them of seeking to destroy the rights 
of the Southern states and to rob the President of his legal powers 
under the Constitution, and even to encourage his assassination. 
When Congress, in the early months of 1866, passed bills ^ to protect 
the negroes against the hostile legislation of the Southern states, 
Johnson vetoed the bills. But Congress was strong enough to pass 
them over his veto. The battle was then fairly joined between the 
President and Congress, and it boded ill for the prospects of peace 
and order in the South. 

546. The Fourteenth Amendment. On April 30, 1866, the com- 
mittee of fifteen reported. It recommended a new amendment to 
the Constitution (the fourteenth) which defined as "citizens of the 
United States and of the State wherein they reside," "all persons 
born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the juris- 
diction thereof," and guaranteed these citizens full protection in their 
civil rights.^ Furthermore, the amendment reduced the representation 
in Congress of any state which refused to let the negro vote, and 
disqualified the leaders of the Confederacy from holding federal or 

1 Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania (not to be confused with Stephens of Georgia) was 
the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations in Congress, a bitter enemy of tlie South, 
and leader of the " radical " Republicans, who were determined to punish the " rebels " 
severely. Stevens ruled Congress as no other politician in our history had done. 

2 To wit, the Freedman's Bureau Bill, continuing and enlarging the power of that bureau 
of the War Department (p. 384, note), and the Civil Rights Bill, protecting the negro in his 
life, property, and freedom of movement and occupation. 

3 Civil rights (see note 2) are distinguished from political rights. The former are the 
rights that every citizen (ch'is) has ; the latter are the privileges of voting and holding office. 
Women and children, for example, have full civil rights, that is, X\i& protection of the govcm- 
7tic)it ; but, except in the states which have granted woman suffrage, they have no political 
rights, that is, of taking part in the government. By the grant of citizenship to the negro, the 
Fourteenth Amendment overruled Chief Justice Taney's decision in the Dred Scott case 
(see p. 313,). 



386 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

state office.^ This last provision, which deprived the Southern lead- 
ers of their political rights, was harsh and unkind, assuming as it 
did that these men were not reconciled to the Union. But the rest 
of the Fourteenth Amendment was a fair basis for the reconstruction 
of the Southern states. Congress passed the amendment June 13, 
1866, and Secretary Seward sent it to the states for ratification. Ten- 
nessee ratified in July, 1866, and was promptly restored to its full 
privileges in the Union. The other states of the secession might 
well have followed the lead of Tennessee ; but every one of them, | 
indignant at the disqualifying clause, overwhelmingly rejected the 
amendment. It thus failed to secure the votes of three fourths of 
the states of the Union, necessary for its ratification. 

547. The Reconstruction Act. Congress angered by the South's 
rejection of the amendment and backed by the decisive victory 
of the anti- Johnson forces in the autumn elections of 1866, deter- 
mined to apply severe measures. By the Reconstruction Act of 
March 2, 1867, the whole area occupied by the ten recalcitrant 
states was divided into five military districts, and a major gen- 
eral of the Union army was put in command of each district. The 
Johnson governments of 1865 were swept away, and in their place 
new governments were established under the supervision of the major 
generals and their detachments of United States troops.- The Re- 
construction Act provided that negroes should be allowed to partici- 
pate both in framing the new constitutions and in running the new 
governments, while at the same time their former masters were in 
large numbers disqualified by the third section of the Fourteenth 
Amendment. The act further provided that, when the new state 
government should have ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and that 
amendment should have become part of the Constitution of the United 
States, these states should be restored to their place in the Union. 

548. Negro Suffrage forced on the South. Thus by the Recon- 
struction Acts^ of 1867 Congress deliberately forced negro suffrage 

l^ i^The Fourteenth Amendment must be carefully studied and mastered. It is printed in 
full in Appendix II. 

2 In October, 1867, there were 19,320 United States soldiers distributed at 134 posts in 
the South. At Richmond and New Orleans there were over 1000 troops; at other posts 
less than 500. They had charge of the registering of voters and supervised the polling. 

3 Two acts supplementary to the one of March 2 prescribed the method for conducting 
elections in the South (March 23) and made the military authorities in control of the districts 
of the South responsible to the general of the army (Grant) and not to the President (July 19). 



I 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 387 



on the South at the point of the bayonet. The negroes enrolled 
under the acts outnumbered the whites in the states of South Caro- 
lina, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and iSIississippi. They were, with 
few exceptions, utterly unfit for the exercise of political rights. Even 
the colored men of the North, far in advance of their Southern 
brothers who labored in the cotton fields, were allowed the suffrage 
in only six states, where they counted as the tiniest fraction of 
the population. Ohio, in the very yeai:\ Congress was forcing negro 



West Virginia made out of 
the 48 loyal counties of Virginia 
admitted to tbe Union aB a state, 




THE MILITARY DISTRICTS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT OF 1867 



suffrage on the South (1867), rejected by over 50,000 votes the prop- 
osition to give the ballot to the few negroes of that state. To reverse 
the relative position of the races in the South, setting the ignorant 
black man in power over his former master, was no way to insure 
either the protection of the negro's right or the stability and peace 
of the Southern states.^ 

549. Character of the Reconstruction Governments. The Re- 
construction governments of the South were sorry affairs". For the 
exhausted states, already amply " punished " by the desolation of 

1 Lincoln had suggested to the militan' governor of Louisiana during the war that the 
most capable negroes and those who had shown their devotion to the Union by fighting in 
the Federal armies might be given the right to vote. But he had no idea oi forcing the South 
to give a single former slave political rights. Johnson also had earnestly advised the Missis- 
sippi convention of 1865 to give a vote to negroes who possessed $250 worth of property. 



388 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

war, the rule of the negro and his unscrupulous carpetbagger patron 
was an indescribable orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting in- 
competence, — a travesty on government. Instead of seeking to 
build up the shattered resources of the South by economy and in- 
dustry, the new legislatures plunged the states further and further 
into debt by voting themselves enormous salaries and by spending 
lavish sums of money on railroads, canals, and public buildings and 
works, for which they reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in 
" graft." ^ 

550. The Ku-Klux Klans. Deprived by force of any- legal 
means of defense against this iniquitous kind of government, the 

South resorted to intimidation 
.,^K:rn,.ec»su,™.carc.c«tJrri;ri«» and pcrsccution of the negro. 

Secret organizations, called the 
Ku-Klux Klans, made up mostly 
of young men, took advantage 
of the black man's superstitious 
nature to force him back into 
the humble social position which 
he held before the war. The 
s?k5Sfit ::■•:: KKaw,'<,"K'£ffi'::^ii',:is:uK« members of the Ku-Klux on 

The •IK"" ™' "P'5"°M "" ^?; i° "3" '" '><"' En»' Pe"" »( Souths™ uxlity- , , , . . , , 

£3lf-"^ "'""'""" ""'°'^'""" horseback, with man and horse 
A KU-KLUX WARNING robed in ghostly white sheets, 

spread terror at night through 
the negro quarters and posted on trees and fences horrible warn- 
ings to the carpetbaggers and scalawags to leave the country soon 
if they wished to live. Inevitably there was violence done in 
this reign of terror inaugurated by the Ku-Klux riders, Negroes 
were beaten ; scalawags were shot. Of course these deeds of vio- 
lence were greatly exaggerated by the carpetbag officials, who re- 
ported them to Washington and asked more troops for their 

1 The economic evils and social humiliation brouglit on the South by the Reconstruction 
governments are almost beyond description. South Carolina, for example, had a legislature 
in which gS of the 155 members were negroes. Nearly half of the members paid no taxes ; yet 
this legislature spent the people's money by millions. The debt of the state was $5,000,000 
in 1S68 ; by 1872 it had been increased to $18,000,000; in one year $200,000 was spent in 
furnishing the state capitol with costly plate-glass mirrors, lounges, desks, armchairs, and 
other luxurious appointments, including a free bar, for the use of the negro and scala- 
wag legislators. It took the Southern states from two to nine years to get rid of these 
governments. 




TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 389 

protection. It came to actual fighting in the streets of New Orleans, 
and the trenches outside Vicksburg, which were used in 1863 by the 
Union sharpshooters, were the scene, ten years later, of a disgraceful 
race conflict between blacks and whites. Thus long after the war 
was over, the prostrate South, which should have been well on the 
way to industrial and commercial recovery, under the leadership of 
its own best genius, still presented in many parts a spectacle of 
anarchy, violence, and fraud, — its legislatures and offices in the 
grasp of low political adventurers, its resources squandered or stolen, 
its people divided into two bitterly hostile races. 

551. The "Crime of Reconstruction." Why did the North put j 
upon the South the unbearable burden of negro rule supported by 
the bayonet ? For various reasons. Some men, desiring justice above 
all things, believed that the only way to secure the negro in his civil 
rights was to put the ballot into his hands immediately, regardless 
of his ability to use his political privileges wisely. The partisan 
politicians welcomed negro suffrage as a means of assuring and re- 
taining Republican majorities in the Southern states.^ And finally, 
there were thousands of men in the North who wished to punish the 
South for the defiant attitude of the Johnson governments in passing 
the ''black codes," in sending Confederate brigadier generals up to 
Congress, and in rejecting the Fourteenth Amendment. But, however 
exasperating the conduct of the Southern states was, or however un- 
wise their course may have been in rejecting the plan of reconciliation 
offered in the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress did them an un- 
pardonable injury by hastening to reconstruct them on the basis of 
negro suffrage. The South would never have cherished resentment 
against the North for the defeat of 1 861-1865 on the fair field of 
battle ; but all the years that have passed since the death of Abraham 
Lincoln have hardly seen the extinction of the bitter passion roused 
in the hearts of the men, women, and children of the South against their 
fellow countrymen of the North, for the "crime of Reconstruction." 

1 In the presidential election of iS6S, for example, six of the eight states of the secession 
which took part in the election voted for the Republican candidate, General Grant! Such a 
result could have been accomplished only by the enfranchisement of the negroes and the 
disfranchisement of the whites. Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas were not restored to their 
place in the Union until 1870 ; and as a condition they were obliged to ratify the Fifteenth 
Amendment (adopted in 1870), which forbids the nation or any state to disfranchise a person 
on account of " race, color, or previous condition of servitude." 



390 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

The Aftermath of the War 

552. The Civil War a Turning Point in American History. 
The Civil War was a turning point in our history. It settled political 
and moral questions which had been vexing the American people for 
nearly half a century, and it opened other questions, industrial and 
economic, which have been increasingly absorbing the attention of 
our country. It cleared the way for the development of the great 
free West through the renewed migration of the farmer, the miner, 
and the ranchman, — a migration which was promoted by the liberal 
distribution of public lands to Western settlers and the completion 
of the railway to the Pacific coast. It changed the scene and the 
setting of our national stage, bringing on the railroad magnate, the 
corporation promoter, the capitalist legislator, the socialist agitator, 
in place of the old champion of " free speech, free soil, free men," 
and the old defender of the Constitution and the Union. 

553. A Land of Freedom. The first and most important question 
settled by the war was that this reunited country should be free soil 
from sea to sea. Westward expansion has been the most continuous 
and influential factor in our national development. From the days 
when the colonial pioneers first pushed across the ridges of the Alle- 
ghenies, almost all our great political problems had been intimately 
connected with the growth of our country and the development of 
its vast natural resources. The great outburst of national enthusiasm 
which followed the War of 1812 and which was encouraged by the 
invention of the reaper, the steam railway, and the electric telegraph 
would have led undoubtedly to the rapid extension of our population 
and our industry to the Far West had not the slavery question cast 
its sinister shadow across the path of the pioneer. The broad fields 
of Kansas, which now produce a hundred million bushels of corn, 
were destined first to be fertilized by the blood of civil strife. The 
triumph of the cause of freedom brought the assurance that our 
immense Western domain was to be filled not by hostile factions 
wrangling over the constitutional and moral right of the white man 
to hold the negro in slavery, but by fellow Americans competing in 
the generous rivalry of developing a common heritage and building 
a new empire of industry. 

554. The Supremacy of the Nation. In the second place, the 
war decided the supremacy of the national government over the 



4 



i 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 391 

states. From the days of the ratification of the Constitution down 
to the secession of South Carolina, there had been widely divergent 
opinions as to the amount of power the states had "delegated" or 
resigned to the national government. The states, both North and 
South, had frequently claimed the right to suspend or annul an act 
of Congress which they judged to be a violation of the Constitution ; 
and in some instances they had even threatened to secede from the 
Union unless such offensive acts were repealed.^ But the appeal 
to arms in 1861-1865 not only put to rest the idea of a separate 
Southern Confederacy ; it stimulated the national government to the 
"exercise of great and unusual powers. The President had suspended 
the regular process of the courts in the arrest and trial of men for 
treason ; he had recognized loyal minorities in some of the Southern 
states as the true state governments ; he had, by proclamation, 
emancipated the slaves of all men in rebellion against the United 
States. Congress had imposed direct taxes, had created a national 
banking system, had borrowed huge sums of money, had put into 
circulation paper currency, had admitted the loyal counties of Vir- 
ginia to the Union as the new state of West Virginia, and, finally, 
had proposed an amendment to the Constitution (the thirteenth) 
abolishing slavery in every part of the country. When the war was 
over, therefore, national supremacy was firmly established ; and it 
has grown stronger rather than weaker in the years that have 
;^ollowed. 

555. New Problems created by the War. It was inevitable, 
however, that the long, severe war should bring in its train per- 
plexing problems. A huge national debt had been incurred ; trade 
and industry had been unduly stimulated by the government's im- 
mediate demand for munitions, clothing, food, and supplies of every 
kind ; our relations with foreign countries had been disturbed ; and 
our country was in a state of feverish unrest at home. The problem 
before our statesmen was how to restore political and economic 
equilibrium. 

556. The Impeachment of President Johnson. Congress had 
generously indorsed Lincoln's exercise of war powers, but when peace 
came the pendulum swung to the other extreme. We have seen how 

1 The student will recall the protest of Virginia and Kentucky against the Alien and 
Sedition laws in 1798, of the Hartford Convention against the War of 1812, and of South 
Carolina against the tariff acts of 1S28 and 1832 (pp. 172, 1S9, 230). 



392 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Congress antagonized Johnson, overriding his vetoes with mocking 
haste and depriving him of his constitutional control of the army. 
On March 2, 1867, Congress passed a law called the Tenure of 
Office Act, which forbade the president to remove officers of the 
government without the consent of the Senate and made the tenure 
of cabinet officers extend through the term of the president by whom 
they were appointed. This was an invasion of the privilege which 
^ the president had always enjoyed of removing his cabinet officers at 
will. The purpose of the act was to keep Stanton, who was in 
thorough sympathy with the radical leaders of Congress, at the head 
of the Department of War. President Johnson violated the Tenure 
of Office Act, as Congress hoped he would, and removed Stanton. 
The House impeached him, February 24, 1868, and the Senate as- 
sembled the next month under the presidency of Chief Justice Chase 
to try the case (Constitution, Article I, section 3, par. 6). To the 
chagrin of the radical Republicans the Senate failed by one vote 
of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict the President, seven 
Republicans voting with the Democrats for his acquittal (May 16, 
1868).^ Johnson finished out his term, openly despised and flouted 
by the Republican leaders, and was succeeded on JVIarch 4, 1869, 
by General U. S. Grant. 

557. President Grant. As a soldier Grant had been superb ; as 
a statesman he was pitiable. He knew nothing about the adminis- 
tration of a political office. He had simply been rewarded for his 
services in the war by the presidency of the United States, as a 
hero might be rewarded by a gold medal or a gift of money. He 
was so simple, direct, and innocent himself that he failed to under- 
stand the duplicity and fraud that were practiced under his very 
nose. Unfortunately his early struggle with poverty and his own 
failure in business had led him to set too high a valuation on mere 
pecuniary success, making him unduly susceptible to the influence of 
men who had made millions. He was easily managed by the astute 

1 The condemnatiorx of President Johnson would have been a gross injustice. The Tenure 
of Office Act was passed only to set a trap for him. His veto of acts of Congress in 1866-1867 
had been entirely within his rights by the Constitution, and his abuse of the congressional 
leaders in public speeches, while a personal insult, could not be called a political crime. In 
a desperate attempt, therefore, to find grounds (" high crimes or misdemeanors ") on which 
they could impeach the President, the radical congressmen passed a most unfair law which 
they were pretty sure Johnson would violate. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 393 

Republican politicians in Congress, who could, by their plausible 
arguments, make the worse cause appear to him to be the better.^ 
In his treatment of the South, for example, Grant was changed by 
his radical Republican associates, like Benjamin F. Butler, from a 
generous conqueror into a narrow partisan. ''He dwindled from 
the leader of the people," says Dunning, ''to the figurehead of a 
party." At Appomattox he had been noble. In a visit to the 
Southern states, a few months after the close of the war, he had be- 
come convinced, as he wrote, that " the mass of thinking men at the 
South accepted in good faith" the outcome of the struggle. Yet as 
president he upheld the disgraceful negro governments of the Recon- 
struction Act and constantly furnished troops to keep the carpetbag 
and scalawag officials in power in the South, in order to provide 
Republican votes for congressmen and presidential electors." 

558. The Low Tone of Public Morality. Probably the tone of 
public morality was never so low in all our country's history, before 
or since, as it was in the years of Grant's administration (i 869-1877), 
although a more honest president never sat in the White House. 
The unsettled condition of the country during the Civil War and 
the era of Reconstruction furnished a great opportunity for dis- 
lionesty. Men grew rich on fraudulent deeds. Our state legislatures 
and municipal governments fell into the hands of corrupt "rings." 
The notorious "Boss" Tweed robbed the city of New York of 
millions of dollars before he closed his career in the Ludlow Street 
jail in 1878. Secretary of War Belknap resigned in order to escape 
impeachment for sharing the graft from the dishonest management 
of army posts in the West. The President's private secretary, Bab- 
cock, was implicated in frauds which robbed the government of its 
revenue tax on whisky. Western stagecoach lines, in league with 

^ The contemporary criticism of Grant by men of the highest poUtical wisdom was one 
of pity rather than censure. George WilHam Curtis wrote to a friend in 1S70, " I think the 
warmest friends of Grant feel that he has failed terribly as a president, but not from want of 
honesty." James Russell Lowell wrote, " I liked Grant, and was struck by the pathos of his 
face ; a puzzled pathos as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not under- 
stand the terms." 

'^ Congress, by the " Force Bill " of February, 1871, established federal supervision over 
elections for the House of Representatives. From 1870 to 1878 the United States spent 
from $60,000 to $100,000 on each congressional election. In the presidential contest of 1S76, 
which cost the government $275,000, the polling places in the Southern states were supers 
vised by 7000 deputy marshals of the United States. 



394 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

corrupt post-office officials, made false returns of the amount of 
business done along their routes and secured large appropriations 
from Congress for carrying the mails. Some of these "pet routes," 
or "star routes," cost the government thousands of dollars annually 
and carried less than a dozen letters a week. Members of Congress 
so far lost their sense of official propriety as to accept large amounts 
of railroad stock as "a present" from men who wanted legislative 
favors for their roads. 

559. The Reform Movement. Before Grant's first term was 
over, a reform movement was started in the Republican party as a 
protest against corruption in national, state, and municipal govern- 
ment. Among the leaders of the movement were Carl Schurz, a ref- 
ugee from the German Revolution of 1848, Charles Francis Adams^ 
our minister to England during the Civil War, and George William 
Curtis, editor of Harper's Weekly. The chief policies advocated by 
the new party were first, civil service reform, by which appointments 
to office should be made on the basis of the merit and not of the 
political '' pull " of the candidates ; second, tariff reform, by which 
the highly protective war duties, which were enriching a few manu- 
facturers at the cost of the mass of the people, should be reduced ; 
third, the complete cessation of Federal military intervention ta 
support the carpetbag governments of the South. 

560. Defeat of the Liberal Republicans. Had the reform party 
shown the same wisdom in the choice of a candidate and the manage- 
ment of their campaign as they did in the making of their platform, 
they might have defeated Grant in 1872 and put an end to the cor- 
rupt partisan government which he was powerless to control. But 
dissensions in their own camp (always the curse of reform movements 
in politics) prevented the delegates to the new party's convention 
in Cincinnati, May, 1872, from nominating a strong candidate. They 
finally united on Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune^ 
a vehement, irritable man, who had no qualifications for the high 
office of president and whose only real point of agreement with 
the reformers was a desire to see the Southern states delivered from 
the radical Reconstruction governments. The Democrats accepted 
Greeley, but his defeat was overwhelming. He carried only six 
states, with 66 electoral votes, while thirty-one states, with 286 
votes, went for Grant. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 395 



561. Maximilian in Mexico. Meanwhile the administrations of 
Johnson and Grant were witnessing important negotiations with 
foreign countries, rising out of the conditions of the war. We have 
already noticed how both England and France favored the Southern 
cause and how eager the agents of the Confederacy were to get 
substantial aid from these countries (p. 343). Napoleon III, em- 
peror of France, thought the moment of civil strife in America favor- 
able for the expansion of French interests in the Western Hemisphere. 
He prevailed upon Archduke Maximilian, brother of the Emperor 
of Austria, to accept the " throne of 

Mexico" and sent an army of 35,000 
Frenchmen to uphold his dynasty. 
Maximilian, with his French army, 
easily made himself master of Mexico ; 
but when our Civil War was over. Sec- 
retary Seward politely informed the 
Emperor of the French that the United 
States could not allow the Monroe Doc- 
trine to be thus infringed and that no 
part of this Western Hemisphere was 
open to the encroachment of European 
powers. At the same time General 
Grant, acting on the President's orders, 
sent General Sheridan with an army to 

the Mexican border (1865). Napoleon, realizing that his position 
was untenable, withdrew his troops from Mexico. The unfortunate 
archduke, refusing to give up his precarious throne, was taken by the 
Mexicans, court-martialed, and shot (June, 1867). 

562. The Alabama Claims. The British government entertained 
no such wild scheme as Napoleon's of setting up an empire in the 
W^estern Hemisphere, but its offense against the United States was 
more direct and serious. In spite of warnings from our minister, 
Charles Francis Adams, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, 
allowed warships built for the Confederacy to leave the ports of 
England to prey on the commerce of the United States. The Florida 
sailed in March, 1862, and the famous Alabama slipped away from 
Liverpool in July. The next summer two ironclad rams were ready 
to leave Laird's shipyards, when they were stopped by Lord Russell, 




HORACE GREELEY 



396 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

to whom Adams wrote curtly, "It would be superfluous in me to 
point out to your Lordship that this is war." The damage done to the 
commerce of the United States by the Alabama and the other cruisers 
built in England for the Confederacy was immense.^ Not only did 
they destroy some $20,000,000 worth of our merchant ships and 
cargoes on the high seas but their encouragement of the Confederate 
cause prolonged the war perhaps for many months. 

563. The Geneva Tribunal. Charles Sumner, the chairman of 
the Senate committee on foreign relations, made the extravagant 
demand that the British government should pay $200,000,000 dam- 
ages and give up all its colonies on the mainland of America (Canada, 
Honduras, Guiana). On May 8, 1871, British and American com- 
missioners signed a treaty at Washington adjusting some points of 
dispute in the perennial boundary and fishery questions and agreeing 
that the claims of the United States for damage done her commerce 
by the Alabama and the other offending cruisers should be settled by 
an international arbitration tribunal to meet at Geneva in Switzer- 
land. Besides the British representative (Lord Cockburn) and the 
American (Charles Francis Adams), the tribunal contained a dis- 
tinguished statesman from each of the countries of Switzerland, Italy, 
and Brazil. The tribunal decided that Great Britain had been guilty 
of a breach of the neutrality laws in allowing the cruisers to sail 
from her ports and awarded the United States damages to the amount 
of $15,500,000 in gold (September, 1872).^ 

564. The Purchase of Alaska. The government of the Russian 
Czar, Alexander II, had been in sympathy with the Union cause 
during the war. Therefore, when Russia asked us to buy Alaska 
of her, we were favorably disposed toward the negotiation. The 
distant arctic region had apparently little value except for its seal 
fisheries, but Secretary Seward closed the bargain for its purchase^ 
March 30, 1867. The price paid Russia for 577,390 square miles 
of frozen territory was $7,200,000, or about two cents an acre. It 

1 After destroying about sixty Northern merchant vessels, the Alabama was sunk by the 
Union warship Kearsarge, Captain Winslow, in a spectacular battle off the coast of Cherbourg, 
France, June 19, 1S64. The Shenandoah, another swift commerce destroyer in the Confed- 
erate navy, was still cruising in the Pacific when the news reached her, several weeks after 
the surrender of Lee and Johnston, that the Civil War was over. 

■-A few years later the United States was condemned to pay Great Britain about 
#5,500,000 for violating the fisheries treaty of 1818. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 397 

has proved an exceptionally good purchase, the gold taken in the 
last twenty years from the Yukon valley alone being worth very 
many times the $7,200,000 paid for the territory. 

565. Secretaries Seward and Fish. It was fortunate for the coun- 
try that we had two such able and judicious men as Seward and 
Hamilton Fish at the head of the State Department during the 
troubled administrations of Johnson and Grant. Fish rendered the 
country great services besides his negotiations with Great Britain 




MAP OF ALASKA SUPERIMPOSED ON THE UNITED STATES 



in the treaty of Washington and the Alabama claims. He kept Presi- 
dent Grant from hastily recognizing the Cubans as belligerents in 
their revolt against Spanish authority in the island in the summer 
of 1869 ; and four years later prevented our going to war with Spain 
over the execution of nine American citizens of the crew of the Vir- 
ginius — a vessel captured while carrying arms and ammunition to 
the insurgent Cubans.^ He restrained the President in his desire 
to purchase and annex the republic of Santo Domingo through a 
treaty negotiated by his private secretary. Had our congressional 
leaders during this period been men of the stamp of Seward and Fish, 

1 The Spanish authorities returned the J-^irginius and the surviving members of her crew 
to the United States ; but it was soon proved that the vessel was sailing under a false reg- 
istry and hence fraudulently flying the American flag. This made her crew pirates, justly 
subject to execution. 



398 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

instead of the violent, vindictive Stevens, the unspeakable demagogue 
Butler, the visionary Sumner, and the proud, uncompromising parti- 
san Conkling, American history would have been spared many 
humiliating pages. 

566. The Economic Results of the War. While the war left the 
, South prostrate, impoverished by the strict blockade and wasted by 

the invading armies, it served rather as a stimulus to business in the 
North. Capital was abundant and was freely invested. During the 
decade 1 860-1 870 the employees in factories increased over 50 per 
cent and their productions over 100 per cent. The rush to the mines 
and ranches of the Far West led to the creation of the territories of 
Nevada (1861), Dakota (1861), and Arizona (1863). In 1862 Con- 
gress approved several projects for building railroads to the Pacific 
to replace the overland and the pony expresses, and in the same year, 
by the Homestead Act, bestowed quarter sections (160 acres) of 
land on Western pioneers who should cultivate their farms for five 
years. In 1863 Secretary Chase established the system of national 
banks. In 1864 the value of the oil products of the Pittsburgh 
region alone reached $15,000,000. 

567. Railroad Building after the War. The extension of the 
railroad is the best index of this post-bellum prosperity. Between 
1865 and 1873 the total mileage in the United States increased from 
35,000 to 70,000, and from 819 miles of new tracks to 7439 miles. 
Between 1869 and 1873 the New York Central, the Hudson River, 
and the Lake Shore roads were joined to make through connections 
between New York and Chicago under a single management. By 
1875 there were five trunk lines from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic 
seaboard. The generosity of Congress to the Pacific railroad com- 
panies was almost unlimited. It granted them over 100,000,000 acres 
of land along the proposed routes, and loans in government bonds 

.amounting to $60,000,000. The 47,000,000 acres granted to the 
Northern Pacific alone were estimated by a high official in the rail- 
road business to be valuable enough " to build the entire railroad to 
Puget Sound, to fit out a fleet of sailing vessels and steamers for the 
China and India trade, and leave a surplus that would roll up into 
the millions." 

568. The Union Pacific and the Credit Mobilier. Rail com- 
munication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts was completed 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 399 

when the Union Pacific starting westward from Omaha and the 
Central Pacific starting eastward from San Francisco met at Ogden, 
Utah, in May, 1869. A golden spike was driven to celebrate the 
event. But even this great engineering feat of laying iron bands 
for 1 800 miles from the Missouri to the Pacific, over yawning chasms 
and precipitous ledges, through long deserts where the only signs of 
life were the black herds of buffaloes or the hostile bands of Sioux 
and Cheyennes, was not accomplished without the taint of that cor- 
ruption which seemed to pervade every field of public activity during 



3^1 










rf P ' 




DRIVING THE LAST SPIKE IN THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD 



Grant's administration. Some leading directors of the Union Pacific 
formed a construction company called the Credit Mobilier, and in 
their capacity as directors awarded to themselves as builders huge 
contracts at enormous profits. To secure favors from Congress and 
ward off investigation, they distributed shares of the Credit Mobilier 
stock where they would ''do the most good." That honest men, 
like Vice President Colfax and James A. Garfield, accepted this stock 
without investigating its origin only proves how low was the general 
moral tone of public life. 

569. The Panic of 1873. A too rapid and optimistic expansion 
of business and the conversion of too large a part of the resources 
of the country into " fixed capital " in railroads and factories brought 
on a severe panic in 1873, sending up the price of living and causing 
great misery among the working classes. Strikes occurred on the 



400 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

railroads and in the mines. Labor congresses, held in our largest 
cities, made public the demands of the working classes for an eight- 
hour day, for the exclusion of Chinese laborers from the country, for 
the government inspection of mines and factories, for the direct issue 
of money by the government instead of by the banks, for the cessation 
of land grants to railroads or corporations, for the regulation of rail- 
road rates, a tax on incomes, and the establishment of a national 
Department of Labor at Washington. 

570. The Challenge to the Republican Party. Sobered by the 
panic and warned by the contemporaneous reform movement which 
we have already noticed (p. 394), the Republicans began to set their 
house in order. The capture of the House of Representatives by the 
Democrats in 1874 (for the first time since 1856) warned the Grant 
administration that the time was past when the Republican party 
could appeal to the voters on the old issue of the "crime of rebellion" 
and, on the plea of having saved the country, could rule it as they 
pleased. New questions — of currency, of transportation, of the 
tariff, of immigration, of civil service reform, of monopolies, of capital 
and labor — were coming to the fore. In 1872 a national labor 
party was in the iield with demands for an eight-hour working day 
and free public education at the nation's expense. In 1876 the farm- 
ers of the West were demanding national regulation of the railroads 
and money issued directly by the government instead of a currency 
based on the Eastern bankers' gold and silver. 

571. The Hayes-Tilden Campaign. In the national convention 
of 1876, therefore, the Republicans rejected the brilliant but some- 
what discredited Speaker of the House, James G. Blaine of Maine,^ 
and nominated a man of sterling honesty and conciliatory views 
on the Southern question. General Rutherford B. Hayes, governor 
of Ohio. The Democrats nominated Governor Samuel J. Tilden of 
New York, who had won a national reputation for his good work in 
the exposure of the rascality of the Tweed Ring. The result of the 
Hayes-Tilden campaign was of little importance, for the election of 

1 Blaine was one of the most brilliant men in the history of American politics. In his 
personal charm, his splendid oratory, his keenness in debate, his hold on the affections of 
his followers, he resembled his great predecessor in the chair of the House, Henry Clay. But 
Blaine was far inferior to Clay in moral stature. He was involved in dealings with Western 
railroads which even his highly dramatic speech of self-defense in the House could not make 
seem regular and honest to his countrymen. We shall meet his name later in these pages. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 401 

either man meant the inauguration of a new era in our politics, — 
the end of the carpetbag rule in the South and of the tyranny of 
Congress. But the election itself was the most exciting in our his- 
tory. Late in the evening of election day (November 7) it was 
almost certain that Tilden had carried enough states to give him 
184 electoral votes. Only 185 votes were necessary for a choice. 
A double set of returns came from the four states of South Carolina, 
Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon.^ A single vote from any of these 
states, therefore, would give Tilden the election. The Hayes man- 
agers claimed all the disputed votes ; but there was no provision 
made in the Constitution or in any law of Congress to decide which 
set of returns was legal. The Constitution (Amendment XII) simply 
states : '' The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the 
Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and 
the votes shall then be counted." 

572. The Electoral Commission. Excitement ran high as the 
winter of 1876-1877 passed and the possibility presented itself of 
the country's being without a president on March 4, 1877, As a 
compromise an Electoral Commission of 1 5 members was created by 
act of Congress, to consist of 5 senators (3 Republicans, 2 Demo- 
crats), 5 representatives (3 Democrats, 2 Republicans), and 5 jus- 
tices of the Supreme Court (2 Republicans, 2 Democrats, and i to 
be elected by these 4) . The fifteenth member. Justice Bradley, voted 
with the Republicans on every question. By a vote of 8 to 7 the 
Republican certificates were accepted from all the states in dispute, 
and Hayes was declared president by an electoral vote of 185 to 
184. The decision was reached on the eve of inauguration day, 
and the new President took the oath of office in perfect security 
and tranquillity. That the inauguration of a man whom more than 
half the country believed to have been fairly defeated on election 
day could take place without a sign of civil commotion is perhaps 
the most striking proof in our history of the moderate and law- 
abiding character of the American people. 

' 1 The double set of returns from the three Southern states was due to the fact that the 
carpetbag governments which were still in control there rejected the votes of some districts 
on the ground that there had been fraud and intimidation at the polls. In Oregon one of 
the Republican electors chosen was disqualified by the fact that he held a federal office in 
the state, and the Democrats insisted that ths man with the next highest vote on the list 
(a Democrat) should replace him. 



402 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

A New Industrial Age 

573. The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. The closing 
year of Grant's presidency (1876) was the centennial of American 
independence. The event was celebrated by a great world's fair 
at Philadelphia, the birthplace of the republic. Ten million visitors 
to the exposition grounds caught the inspiration of the wonderful 
achievements in science and invention which the years of peace were 
bringing forth. The Centennial Exposition was a pledge of the re- 
covery of our nation from the political, industrial, and financial 
difficulties brought on it by the Civil War. Already the rule of 
the stranger was passing in the Southern states, and a Mississippi 
congressman had pronounced a eulogy over the body of Charles 
Sumner, exhorting his fellow countrymen to know one another that 
they might love one another (1874). Already the United States 
had passed a law pledging the payment of every dollar of its war 
debt in the precious metals of gold and silver (1875). Already a 
national convention had declared in its platform that 'Hhe United 
States of America is a nation, not a mere league" (1876). It had 
taken a full hundred years and cost a long and bloody war to de- 
cide that point. The century had seen the rounding out of our 
national domain. The railroad ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
and all the area between had been organized into states or territories. 
The country was ready for new tasks, and the belted wheels, the 
giant shafts, the electric lights, the splendid specimen products of 
the farms, gardens, and wheat fields of the land, the improved models 
in machinery, and the wonderful inventions in transportation, which 
were displayed at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, were all a 
witness and a prophecy of the new era of industrial expansion on 
which we were entering. 

674. Growth of our Productions, Manufacture, and Trade. 
Whatever chapter of the census reports we open for the decade 
following the war, we read the same story-. Our coal output increased 
fivefold and our steel output a hundredfold in the period from 
1865 to 1875. The wheat crop in Dakota alone increased from 1000 
bushels in i860 to 3,000,000 in 1880, and the corn crop in Kansas 
from 6,060,000 to over 100,000,000 bushels. When the Civil War 
opened we were producing about $50,000,000 worth of precious 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 403 

metals annually ; twenty years later the single state of Colorado was 
taking from its mines over $1,000,000 worth of gold, lead, and silver 
per month. Nevada, which was a mining camp of less than 7000 
inhabitants in i860, had grown by 1870 into a state of the Union 
with a population of 42,000. In the decade preceding the war the 
value of our manufactures increased 85 per cent; in the decade fol- 
lowing they increased 125 per cent. The year of Hayes's election 
marks the permanent change in favor of the United States in the 
statistics of foreign trade. Before 1876 our exports had exceeded our 
imports in but three years (1857, 1862, 1874); since 1876 there 
have been but three years (1888, 1889, 1898) in which our imports 
have exceeded our exports. 

575. Our Wealth and Population. The wealth of the country 
grew from $16,000,000,000 to $43,000,000,000 between i860 and 
1880, and the deposits in our savings banks (the best index of a 
nation's prosperity) increased 600 per cent. During the same period 
our population grew from 30,000,000 to 50,000,000, while the liberal 
homestead laws and the development of the Western railroads at- 
tracted an unprecedented number of Irish, German, and Scandinavian 
immigrants to the fertile farm lands beyond the Mississippi. Between 
i860 and 1870 Arizona, Colorado, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and 
Wyoming were organized as territories, and Kansas, Nebraska, and 
Nevada were admitted as states of the Union. Edmund Burke, in 
his famous '^ Speech on Conciliation with America," delivered in 
Parliament in 1775, had exclaimed, " Such is the strength with which 
population shoots in that part of the world that, state the numbers 
as high as we will, while the dispute continues the exaggeration ends." 
It seemed in 1875 as though the orator's enthusiastic language of 
a century earlier were fulfilled in sober fact. 

576. Effects of the Industrial Boom. With the recovery from 
the panic of 1873 our industries entered on a period of unprecedented 
expansion. New inventions followed each other in rapid succession — 
the electric light and trolley, the telephone, the phonograph, the 
bicycle, the typewriter. The elevated railroad began to appear in 
our cities ; through trains to the West were operated with increas- 
ingly luxurious equipment ; steel bridges were thrown across our 
rivers. Immigration, which had fallen to 70,000 during the war, 
almost reached the half-million mark by 1880. More and more the 



404 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



mills and factories, the commercial houses and the big shops, gath- 
ered the population into cities. When the first census was taken only 
3.4 per cent of our people lived in communities of 8000 or over; 
by the census of 1880 the proportion had increased to 22.6 per 
cent. Already organized labor was facing organized capital with 
the consciousness of its interests as a class. Railway engineers, 
conductors, and firemen, bricklayers, cigar-makers, ironworkers, were 
gathered into unions, to oppose capital's ''right to own and control 
labor for its own greedy and selfish ends." The Knights of Labor, 

a loose federation of workers with the 
motto ''The injury of one is the con- 
cern of all," had nearly 150,000 mem- 
bers through the country. The Grangers, 
or Patrons of Husbandry, championed 
the cause of the farmer in the West and 
passed laws in the grain states (notably 
Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota) 
regulating the freight rates on the rail- 
roads. The miners were demanding 
shorter hours and higher pay. 

577. The Difficult Position of 
President Hayes. It was high time 
for our government to have done 
with the old questions of the war and 
reconstruction, with petty partisan politics and sectional animosi- 
ties, and to face seriously the great problems of the new industrial 
age. None realized this better than President Hayes, but he was 
hampered at every step. A Democratic House opposed him during 
his entire administration, and a Democratic Senate also during 
the last two years of it. For this opposition party he was a " usurper," 
occupying the seat rightfully belonging to Tilden. Nor was he the 
choice of the leaders of the Republican party. He had been nomi- 
nated in the convention of 1876 only because the deadlock between 
the supporters of Blaine and the supporters of Grant could not be 
broken. His face appeared in the Democratic press with the word 
"fraud" written across his brow, while the men of his own party 
who were still devoted to the methods of " machine politics " sneered 
at his efforts for reform, called him a "goody-goody," a hypocrite, 




RUTHERFORD B. HAYES 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 405 

and a "Granny Hayes." Upright, industrious, and public-spirited, 
he lacked the genial and winsome traits of character which could 
conciliate political opponents ; and, like John Quincy Adams, he 
pursued his lonely path of duty, confiding to his diary the rectitude 
of his conduct. 

578. His Excellent Administration. In spite of personal un- 
popularity, and in the face of political and economic turmoil, 
Hayes gave the country one of the cleanest and most courageous 
administrations in its history. He immediately withdrew the Fed- 
eral troops that were still upholding the negro Republican govern- 
ments in Louisiana and South Carolina, letting these states revert to 
the Democratic column. He still further incurred the wrath of the 
Republican machine by dismissing from their important offices 
Chester A. Arthur (collector of the port of New York) and Alonzo 
B. Cornell (naval officer), who with Thomas Piatt and Roscoe 
Conkling made up the "big four" who ruled the politics of New 
York State. He sent a commission to China to prepare the way for 
the negotiation of a treaty which would protect the workers of our 
Pacific coast against the invasion of cheap Mongolian labor.^ He 
strove earnestly to repair the faith of the nation in the eyes of the 
Indian tribes of the Far West, who had been fed on rotten rations, 
deceived by false promises, robbed by unscrupulous agents, and 
goaded into uprisings that had cost our government over $22,000,000 
and the lives of nearly 600 men since the Civil War.^ 

579. The Railroad Strikes of 1877. Hayes had been in office 
but a few months when railroad strikes of unprecedented violence 

1 Between 1S50 and 1S60 the Chinese immigrants to our shores had increased from 
10,000 to 40,000. The work on the western end of the Union Pacific Railroad attracted tens 
of thousrands more in the nex^ decade. As these Chinese laborers lived on a few cents a day 
and were content with dirty quarters and poor food, they were a menace to the American 
laborer of the Pacific coast, who demanded " four dollars a day and roast beef." Mobs in 
California and Oregon organized to " run out of town " the Chinese coolies, in spite of the 
fact that our government, by the Burlingame Treaty of 1S6S, had guaranteed the Chinese 
visiting our shores protection in trade, religion, and free travel. In 1S79 Congress repealed 
parts of the Burlingame Treaty, but Hayes vetoed the bill. Finally, through the efforts of 
the Hayes commission, an arrangement was made with China by which that country agreed 
to our regulation of labor immigration from her shores. 

2 The most disastrous of these Indian uprisings was the resistance of the Sioux, under 
their chief Sitting Bull, to the orders of the government bidding them leave their hunting 
grounds in southern Montana and move further west. The gallant Colonel George A. Custer, 
with a force of 262 men, trying to surprise Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn River, was 
defeated and killed with every soul of his little army, June 25, 1876. 



406 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

broke out. The trouble started with a lo per cent reduction in the 
wages of the trainmen on the Baltimore and Ohio and the laying 
off of train crews on the Pennsylvania. By midsummer of 1877 a 
number of roads in the states from the Atlantic coast to the Missouri 
River were tied up by strikes, and the anthracite mining region of 
eastern Pennsylvania was terrorized by lawless mobs. Chicago, Balti- 
more, Reading, Scranton, and Pittsburgh were the scenes of riots 
and bloodshed. The President was forced to call on the militia of 
several states and even to dispatch United States troops to certain 
points to quell the disorder. In Pittsburgh, where the rioting was at 
its worst, $10,000,000 worth of property in cars, buildings, and 
freight was destroyed and over 50 men were killed or wounded before 
order was restored. 

580. Financial Measures of Hayes's Administration. Two 
financial measures of importance were carried in Hayes's mid-term, — ■ 
the Bland-Allison Act for the coinage of silver and the bill for re- 
sumption of specie payments. From Washington's administration 
till long after the close of the Civil War comparatively little silver 
had been coined into money at the United States mints. The busi- 
ness of the country was not large enough to demand more currency 
for its transactions than the supply of gold could furnish. The 
government stood ready to receive silver bullion at its mints for 
coinage at the established rate of fifteen ounces of silver to one ounce 
of gold before 1834 and approximately sixteen ounces of silver to 
one ounce of gold after that date. But such was the comparative 
scarcity of silver in the middle years of the century that the mine 
owners could sell it to the jewelers and artisans at a higher price 
than the government paid. Between 1850 and 1873, therefore, 
almost no silver was brought to the mints, and in the latter year 
Congress quietly passed a law stopping the coinage of silver dollars.^ 
Just at that moment enormous deposits of silver were discovered 
in our Western states. One mine, whose product in 1873 was worth 
but $645,000, increased its output to $16,000,000 in two years. The 

1 This law simply recognized the state of affairs which existed. Since the amount of silver 
which went into a silver dollar could be sold to the silversmiths for ^1.02 in 1873, the mine 
owners naturally disposed of their product in the market where it brought the highest price. 
It was they, and not the government, that discontinued silver coinage. In later years the 
advocates of the free coinage of silver spoke of this act as the "crime of 1873," — as if the 
government had repudiated silver and cheapened it by refusing to coin it. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 407 

famous Comstock lode in Nevada yielded $42,000,000 in three years. 
Our total production of silver, which was $1,000,000 annually in 
1861, rose to $30,000,000 in 1875. The market was flooded. The price 
of silver fell, and the mine owners were anxious again to have 
their product coined at the old rate. In 1874, for the first 
time in a generation, the silver in a dollar was worth more than the 
same weight of silver in a napkin ring or an umbrella handle. The 
mine owners, therefore, clamored for the repeal of the law of 1873 
and the resumption of silver coinage. They were joined in their 
demand by the large class of Western farmers, who, being obliged 
to borrow money for the development of their farms and the trans- 
portation of their crops, had to pay high rates of interest to the 
bankers of the East, who controlled the nation's gold. 

581. The Bland-Allison Act. Representative Richard P. Bland 
of Missouri therefore introduced into Hayes's first Congress a bill for 
the unlimited, or '' free," coinage of silver at the old rate of approxi- 
mately 16 to I. The bill was modified in the Senate by Allison of 
Iowa. Instead of accepting unlimited amounts of silver presented 
at its mints for coinage, the government was to agree, by the Allison 
Amendment, to purchase, for coining into silver dollars, not less than 
$2,000,000 worth nor more than $4,000,000 worth of silver a 
month. In this form the bill passed both Houses of Congress in 
February, 1878, and, although wisely vetoed by President Hayes, 
commanded the necessary two-thirds vote to override his veto. By 
the Bland-Allison Act, then, our government pledged itself to take 
from the mine owners at least $24,000,000 worth of silver every year 
to coin into ^'dollars" which were worth, in 1878, less than ninety 
cents apiece. We shall see in a later chapter some of the results of 
this policy of trying, simply by stamping the United States eagle 
upon coins, to make them more valuable than the worth of the 
metal they contain. 

582. The Resumption of Specie Payments. The other financial 
measure of the Hayes administration was the resumption of specie 
payments, that is, the decision of the United States to pay its obliga- 
tions in " specie," or coin. The "■ greenbacks," or legal-tender notes 
issued to the amount of about $450,000,000 during the Civil War, 
were simply pieces of paper on which were printed the govern- 
ment's promise to pay the bearer the amount specified. When the 



4o8 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

government began to "redeem," or cancel, these notes the debtor 
classes in the West protested and even asked that more greenbacks 
be issued. They had borrowed paper money and did not want to have 
to pay back their debts in gold. But Congress refused to heed their 
demand. In order to maintain the honor of the government and up- 
hold its credit in the eyes of foreign nations, Congress passed a law 
in 1875, fixing January i, 1879, as the date when the Treasury of 
the United States would redeem in coin^ all the outstanding green- 
backs (about $347,000,000). During the years 1877-1878, John 
Sherman, Hayes's able Secretary of the Treasury, had accumulated 
some $140,000,000 worth of gold by the sale of bonds at home and 
abroad ; and when resumption day came, so perfect was the faith 
of the people in the credit of the government that greenbacks to 
the amount of only about $135,000 were presented at the Treasury 
to be exchanged for gold, 

583. The Republican Convention of 1880. No president ever 
deserved a second term more than Hayes. But the shadow cast 
on his title in 1876, combined with his uncompromising independ- 
ence of the leaders of the party, and his failure, through a certain 
aloofness of manner, to appeal to the popular imagination, made his 
nomination in 1880 out of the question. General Grant had just 
returned from a world-circling tour in which he had been received 
with royal honors by the sovereigns of Europe and Asia. A branch 
of the Republican party, called the "stalwarts,"^ led by Senator 
Roscoe Conkling of New York, boomed Grant for a third term, 
chiefly with the hope of reestablishing under the cover of his popu- 
larity the rule of the Republican machine, which had been somewhat 
damaged by President Hayes, Grant's chief rivals in the convention 
-were Senator James G, Blaine of Maine and Hayes's Secretary of 
the Treasury, John Sherman of Ohio. After the convention had bal- 
loted thirty-five times without giving the necessary majority vote to 
either Grant or Blaine, the Wisconsin delegation led a ''stampede" 

1 Since 'the government practically recognized gold as the standard "coin" in 1875, by 
demanding gold in payment of customs dues and paying in gold the interest on its bonds, 
specie payment was taken to mean gold payment, 

2 The " stalwarts," in opposition to the reforming " half-breeds," stood for uncompromising 
partisan rule, for a high protective tariff, for distribution of offices as spoils of political vic- 
tory, for the assessment of officeholders for party contributions, and for the continued use 
of federal troops to coerce the Southern states and of federal inspectors to guard the polling 
places. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 409 



to General James A. Garfield^ of Ohio, who had been sent to the 
convention to work in the interests of Sherman. Chester A. Arthur 
of New York, a " stalwart," was nominated for vice president to ap- 
pease the Conkling faction. The Democrats nominated General 
Winfield S. Hancock, the hero of the battle of Gettysburg. 

584. The Election of Garfield. Garfield was elected by 214 
votes to 155, and at the same time the Republicans regained the 
majority in the House of Representatives, which they had lost in 
1874. It was the first presidential elec- 
tion since i860 in which all the states of 
the Union took part, with the opportu- 
nity of expressing freely their choice; 
for even after the Civil War was over and 
the states of the secession were nominally 
restored to their places in the Union, the 
presence of federal troops at the polls in 
the reconstructed states made a fair 
election impossible (see p. 393, note 2). 
The South, embittered against the Re- 
publican party for its harsh policy of 
Reconstruction, cast a solid Democratic 
vote, even though the candidate of that 

party was the victor of Gettysburg; and for a quarter of a century 
thereafter the "solid South" was found in the Democratic column 
at every presidential election. 

585. Garfield's Assassination. The choice of Garfield was a 
bitter disappointment to the machine politicians. Though a strict 
Republican, the new President elect belonged to that reform wing 
of the party which the "stalwarts" contemptuously called "half- 
breeds." Even before his inauguration he showed such independence 
of the "stalwart" leaders in his selections for cabinet positions and 
high federal offices that the party was hopelessly split. At the ear- 
nest request of Grant, Conkling had taken the stump in the campaign 




JAMES A. GARFIELD 



1 Garfield was one of the best examples of our self-made men of the West. He had worked 
his way up from the towpath to a college presidency and then to a seat in the state senate 
of Ohio. He had distinguished himself for gallant conduct in the famous corps of General 
Thomas at Chickamauga. In the winter of 1863 he had been elected to the House of Rep- 
resentatives, where he served with great distiTiction until his promotion to the presidency 
in 1880. 



4IO THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

and contributed not a little to Garfield's election. Yet Garfield 
made Blaine, Conkling's bitter enemy, Secretary of State, and refused 
to consider the wishes of the New York senator in his appointments. 
Stung by this ''ingratitude," Conkling and his colleague from 
New York, Thomas C. Piatt, resigned their seats in the United 
States Senate.^ Factional spirit ran high and culminated in a 
dastardly crime. A few weeks after the resignation of the New 
York senators, as President Garfield, accompanied by Secretary 
Blaine, entered the Baltimore and Potomac station at Washington, 
Charles Guiteau, a "stalwart" fanatic, crept up to the President 
and fired a bullet into his back. He did it, he said, to rid the coun- 
try of a ''traitor" and seat the "stalwart" Arthur in the presi- 
dential chair. After lingering through the hot weeks of summer in 
dreadful agony. President Garfield died at Elberon, New Jersey, 
September 19, 1881. 

586. Civil Service Reform. Guiteau's pistol shot roused the 
whole country to the disgraceful state of the public service. Political 
offices were the prize of intriguing politicians and wirepullers. Crowds 
of anxious placemen thronged the capital for weeks after the in- 
auguration, pestering the President for appointments in post offices, 
customhouses, and federal courts. Republicans and Democrats 
brought against each other the charge of " insatiable lust for office," — 
and both were right. One politician, when taken to task for not 
working in his office, cynically replied, "Work! why, I worked to get 
here ! " " Voluntary contributions," or assessments, equal to 2 per 
cent of their salary, were levied on officeholders for campaign ex- 
penses, and the funds so raised were used shamelessly to buy votes. 
At the very close of the Civil War thoughtful men had attacked this 
corrupt "spoils system," which had prevailed since Jackson's day. 
For seven years in succession Congressman Jenckes of Rhode Island 
introduced a bill into the House "for the regulation of the civil 

1 The quarrel between Conkling and Garfield led to a most dramatic scene. Conk- 
ling, accompanied by Piatt and Arthur, called on Garfield at his room in the Riggs House 
shortly after his arrival in Washington, and for two hours stormed up and down the 
floor, pouring out the vials of his sarcastic wrath upon the President elect, who sat 
unmoved on the edge of his bed. Neither Piatt nor Conkling was returned to the Senate 
by the legislature of New York. The latter retired from politics and a few years later lost 
his life through exposure in the great blizzard which swept New York City in iSSS. Piatt 
returned to the Senate in 1897, where he served two terms, being replaced by Elihu Root 
in 1909. 



• TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 411 

service,"^ until in March, 1871, a law was passed authorizing the 
president to appoint a commission to ascertain the fitness of candi- 
dates for office in the federal civil service and prescribe rules for their 
conduct. The commission advocated what was later called by Theo- 
dore Roosevelt '' the merit system," that is, the selection of candidates 
by competitive examination rather than their appointment for party 
services, on the sound principle that a man's political opinions have 
little to do with his capacity for a clerkship. The low tone of public 
morality prevailing during Grant's administration discouraged reform 
of the civil service, and in 1875 Congress discontinued the commis- 
sion by failing to make any appropriation for its labors. President 
Hayes encouraged the merit system wherever he could. During his 
administration civil service leagues were formed in over thirty states 
of the Union, and the movement resulted in the establishment of 
the National Civil Service League at Newport in 1880. 

587. The Pendleton Act. Under pressure from this national 
league a bill was introduced into the Senate by George Pendleton 
of Ohio in 1882, which was passed in both Houses of Congress by 
large majorities and signed by President Arthur in January, 1883. 
The Pendleton Act provided for the reestablishment of the Civil Serv- 
ice Commission and for the extension of the '^ merit system" as far 
as the president saw fit. It forbade the assessment of federal servants 
for campaign purposes or the discharge of a competent clerk on ac- 
count of his political opinions. Under its wise provisions about 14,000 
officials in the post-office and customs departments were immediately 
protected against the partisan revenge of victorious political bosses. 

588. The Attitude of the "Stalwarts." The passage of the 
Pendleton Act was a tardy and rather desperate concession to the 
reform idea on the part of the ''stalwart" P^epublicans. For ten 
years they had seen a reform movement going on in their ranks and 
had met that movement with indifference or scorn, ridiculing the civil 
service as "snivel service," and had maintained the high tariff 
which was enriching the few protected manufacturers at the expense 
of the many consumers and was piling up in the Treasury of the 
United States a surplus of money which ought to have been circulat- 
ing in business among the people. The boom in trade which had 

1 By the civil service is meant the great number of clerks and assistants in the executive 
department of the government. 



412 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



followed the panic of 1873 was beginning to slacken in 1881 and 
"hard times" came on. In the congressional elections of 1882 the 
Republican majority of 19 in the House was changed to a Democratic 
majority of 82, and the Republican party, thoroughly alarmed, began 
to consider how it should save its supremacy of a quarter of a 
century in the approaching presidential election of 1884. 

589. James G. Blaine. By far the most prominent man in the 
Republican party was James G, Blaine, whom we have already met 
as candidate for the presidential nomination in 1876 and 1880. As 

Secretary of State for a few months in 
Garfield's cabinet Blaine had heightened 
his immense popularity with that large 
portion of our population which loves a 
display of energy in its public servants. 
He had intervened in a quarrel between 
Peru and Chile with language which 
implied the right of the United States to 
settle the disputes of her weaker sister 
republics of South and Central America. 
He had negotiated (but failed to per- 
suade the Senate to ratify) a number of 
commercial treaties with these republics 
on the principle of "reciprocity," or the 
admission into each country, free of duty, 
of goods which were not produced in that 
country. He had assumed a lofty tone toward Great Britain in a con- 
troversy over the control of a canal to be cut through the Isthmus of 
Panama. His foreign dispatches were written in the nervous, con- 
fident, assertive style of the editorial page of a popular journal 
rather than in the guarded, deliberative language of diplomacy. 

590. The Mugwump Opposition to Blaine. But in spite of 
Blaine's impetuous assertions of patriotism and his great personal 
"magnetism," the reproach of shady dealings with Western railroads 
and land schemes, which had prevented his nomination in 1876, still 
clung to his name. And as the time for the national convention of 
1884 drew near, those same reformers whom he had sarcastically 
dubbed "the unco guid,"^ " Pharisaical, not practical," began the 

1 A Scotch phrase meaning " goody-goody." 




JAMES G. BLAINE 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 413 

movement to prevent his nomination at Chicago. They were ridi- 
culed in the New York Sun as "Mugwumps" — an Indian name 
meaning ''big chief" — because they affected superiority to the rest 
of their party. When Blaine's great popularity secured him the 
nomination over his rivals, President Arthur and Senator Edmunds 
of Vermont (the candidate of the New England reformers), the 
Mugwumps, or Independent Republicans, organized a league at New 
York under the leadership of George William Curtis, the chairman 
of the original Civil Service Commission of 187 1. They protested 
against the nomination of a man ''wholly disqualified for the high 
office of president of the United States" by his alliance with the 
most unscrupulous men of the party and his stubborn opposition 
to all reform ; and they called upon the Democrats to nominate an 
honest, independent candidate for whom truly public-spirited citizens 
could conscientiously vote.^ 

591. Grover Cleveland. The Democrats responded to this invita- 
tion by nominating Grover Cleveland, governor of New York. Cleve- 
land was the son of a poor Presbyterian minister. He had grown 
lip in .western New York, supporting himself as best he could by 
tending a country store, teaching in an asylum for the blind, and 
acting as clerk in a lawyer's office in Buffalo. Here he studied law, 
was admitted to the bar, and, entering local politics, served as as- 
sistant district attorney, then as sheriff of Erie County, and in 1881, 
in his forty-fifth year, was elected mayor of Buffalo on an inde- 
pendent ticket. His administration of the office was so honest, able, 
and courageous that it brought him the Democratic nomination for 
the governorship of New York the next year. He carried the state 
by the unprecedented plurality of 192,000 votes. In the governor's 
chair he showed the same fearless independence which had won him 
the name of the "veto mayor" in Buffalo. He was, like Lincoln and 
Garfield, a " self-made man." 

592. Cleveland and Blaine compared. By nature and training 
Cleveland was the direct antithesis of his rival for the presidential 
election. Blaine was brilliant, genial, daring, and unreliable ; Cleve- 
land was deliberate, patient, plodding, but firm as a rock when he had 

1 Several influential Republican newspapers, like the New York Times and the Springfield 
Republican, advised voting for Cleveland. "The defeat of Blaine," wrote one, "will be the 
salvation of the Republican party." 



414 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

once reached his decision. Blaine, after a college training and ten 
years' experience as teacher and journalist, had entered the Maine 
legislature and from there had gone to the national Congress, where 
he served fourteen years in the House of Representatives (as its 
Speaker from 1869 to 1875) and four years in the Senate, whence 
he was called by Garfield in 1881 to the first place in the cabinet. 
Cleveland had had absolutely no experience in national affairs, had 
never been a member of a legislative body of any sort, and had only 
the political training obtained in the executive offices of sheriff, 
mayor, and governor. 

593. The Campaign of 1884. The campaign was perhaps the 
most bitter and disgraceful of all our history, conducted, as the 
Nation remarked, '' in a spirit worthy of the stairways of a tenement 
house." Being unable to revive the issues of the Civil War for a 
generation of voters who had grown up since the surrender at Ap- 
pomattox, and having no ground for criticism of Cleveland's public 
record in the state of New York, the Republican campaign orators 
attacked the private life of the Democratic candidate, ransacking 
every page of it for occasion of slander or traces of scandal, The 
Democrats in turn revived the whole miserable story of Blaine's 
railroad bonds and the famous Mulligan letters.^ It was clear on 
election night that the result hung on the state of New York, but 
several days of intense excitement passed before it was definitely 
known that Cleveland had carried the state by the slim majority of 
1 149 votes out of 1,167,169.^ 

594. The Party Revolution of 1884. Cleveland's election was 
the first Democratic victory since the campaign of 1856. For the 

1 These were letters which Blaine had written to the railroad manipulators, and which he 
himself thought so damaging to his chances for nomination that he had " borrowed " them 
from Mulligan and refused to return them — though he later in a very dramatic scene read 
them to the House, " inviting the confidence of 44,000,000 of his fellow citizens." The sharp- 
tongued Conkling, being invited to take the stump for Blaine in 1SS4, replied, "Thank you, 
I don't engage in criminal practice." 

2 The vote throughout the country (except in the " solid South ") was very close, Cleve- 
land receiving 4,874,986 to 4,851,981 for Blaine. Many people believe that Blaine lost New 
York, and consequently the election, on account of a remark made near the end of the cam- 
paign by a certain Dr. Burchard at a meeting of the ministers of New York, which had been 
called to congratulate Blaine and wish him success. On that occasion Dr. Burchard referred 
to the Democratic party as the party of " Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." The insulting 
phrase, which implied that Roman Catholics were in a class with drunkards, and that both 
were in sympathy with " rebels," was taken up as a campaign cry all over the land and 
doubtless cost Blaine thousands of votes. 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 415 

quarter of a century since the Confederate mortars had opened their 
fire on Fort Sumter the Republicans had held control of the exec- 
utive branch of our government, with the tens of thousands of 
offices in its patronage. For only one term of Congress during that 
period had the Republicans lost control of the Senate, and they had 
a majority in the House in all but four terms. This long tenure of 
power was the reward the country paid the Republican party for 
its services in preserving the Union and abolishing the curse of 
slavery. Those services were great, but the uses to which the reward 
was put were unworthy. Considerations of public welfare, even of 
common honesty, were often set aside for party ends. Confident in 
their majorities, the Republican leaders defied the growing demand 
for reform in the conduct of the government offices. They sneered at 
the civil-service rules. They tried, by waving the '^bloody shirt," 
to keep alive the savage desire to coerce the South. They hampered 
and hectored their '^ reform president," Hayes. They cynically re- 
duced the tariff 3 per cent (by an act of 1883), when their own 
expert commission recommended a reduction of 20 per cent. They re- 
fused to take warning by the gathering of the reform forces in 1872. 
In the opinion of half the country they had '' stolen " the election 
of 1876 and were generally accused of having ''bought" the election 
of 1880. Consequently, in 1884, they were deposed from their long 
supremacy by the votes of the reformers in their own party, to whose 
entreaties and remonstrances they had turned a deaf ear for more 
than a decade. 

References 

Reconstruction: W. A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic 
(American Nation Series), chaps, i-v; also Military Government during Re- 
construction and The Process of Reconstruction (Essays on the Civil War and 
Reconstruction) ; W. L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox (Chronicles, Vol. 
XXXII); Documentary History of Reconstruction, Vol. I, chaps, ii-v; J. W. 
Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, chaps, i-viii; J. G. Blaine, 
Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. II, chaps, i-xii; F. L. Paxson, The New Nation 
(Riverside History), chap, iii; William MacDonald, Select Documents of 
United States History, 1861-1898, Nos. 42-44, 50-52, 56-62; A. B. Hart, 
American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 145-153; Hugh 
McCuLLOCH, Men and Measures of Half a Century, chaps, xxv-xxvii; J. F. 
Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. V, 
chap. XXX ; Vol. VI, chaps, xxxi, xxxii; series of articles on Reconstruction in 
the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXXXVII, pp. i-iS, I4S-IS7, 354-365) 473-484- 



41 6 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

The Aftermath of War: Dunning (Am. Nation), chaps, v-xxi; also The 
Impeachment and Trial of President Johnson (Essays on the Civil War and 
Reconstruction) ; E. B. Andrews, The United States in our own Time, chaps, 
i-xiv ; Paxson, chaps, iv, v ; Rhodes, Vol. VI, chaps, xxxiii-xxxix ; Hart, Vol. IV, 
Nos. 159, 174-176; MooRFiELD Storey, Life of Charles Sumner, chaps, xix- 
xxiv; Hamlin Garland, Ulysses Grant: his Life and Character, chaps, xxxix-1; 
Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward, Vol. II, chaps, xl-xliii; 
E. L. BoG.'iRT, Economic History of the United States, chaps, xx, xxii, xxv; 
Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, chaps, xxiii-xxv; P. L. Ha worth. 
The Hayes-Tilden Election. 

A New Industrial Age: Carroll D. Wright, Industrial Evolution of the 
United States, chaps, xiii, xiv, xxii, xxiii; Bogart, chaps, xx, x.xii, xxv; N. S. 
Shaler (ed.), The United States, Vol. I, chap, vii; Vol. II, chaps, i, ii, xii; 
E. E. Sparks, National Development (Am. Nation), chaps, i-v, xviii; D. A. 
Wells, Recent Economic Changes, chap, ii; Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 162, 163, 165, 
168, 169; Andrews, chaps, ix-xiv; John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years, 
chaps, xxii-xxvii, xxix-xxxvii; Albert Shaw, Political Problems of American 
Development, chaps, vi-viii; D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United 
States, chaps, xiv-xvii; A. D. Noyes, Forty Years of American Finance, chaps, ii, 
iii; John Mitchell, Organized Labor, chap, viii; James Bryce, The American 
Commonwealth, Vol. II, chap, xlv; J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States 
from Hayes to McKinley, chaps, i-x; Carl R. Fish, The Civil Service and the 
Patronage. 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Ku-Klux Klans: Hart, Vol. IV, No. 156; Rhodes, Vol. VI, pp. 
180-191, 306-320; Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction, Vol. II, 
pp 327-377; W. G. Brown, The Lower South in American History, pp. 191- 
225; J. W. Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi, pp. 338-353; D. L. Wilson, 
The Ku-Klux Klans (Century Magazine, Vol. VI, pp. 398-410) ; Mrs. M. L. 
AvARY, Dixie after the War, pp. 268-278. 

2. The Treaty of Washington: C. F. Adams, Lee at Appomattox and 
Other Papers, pp. 31-198; Rhodes, Vol. VI, pp. 335-341, 360-376; Andrews, 
pp. 87-92 ; W. H. Seward, Diplomatic History of the War for the Union, 
pp. 446-481; Bancroft, Vol. II, pp. 382-399, 492-500; Storey, pp. 340-350. 

3. The Homestead Acts: J. N. Earned, History for Ready Reference and 
Topical Reading, Vol. V, pp. 3463-3464; S. Sato, The Land Question in the 
United States (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. IV, pp. 411-427) ; 
Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain, pp. 332-356; J. B. Sanborn, Some 
Political Aspects of Homestead Legislation (American Historical Review, Vol. 
VI, pp. 19-37) ; A. B. Hart, The Land Policy of the United States (in Essays 
on Practical Government) . 

4. The Granger Movement: Andrews, pp. 281-284; A. T. Hadley, Rail- 
road Transportation, its History and Laws, pp. 129-139; E. W. Martin, 
History of the Grange Movement; C. F. Adams, Jr., The Granger Movement 
(North American Review, Vol. CXX, pp. 394-410) ; C. W. Preisen, Outcome 
of the Granger Movement (Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XXXII, pp. 
SOE-814). 



TWENTY YEARS OF REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY 417 

5. Civil Service Reform: Fish, pp. 209-245; Andrews, pp. 230-235, 336- 
342 ; E. BiE K. FoLTZ, The Federal Civil Service, pp. 38-82 ; Sparks, pp. 
182-201; Hart, Vol. IV, No. 199; Dorman B. Eaton (articles in J. J. Lalor's 
Cyclopcedia of Political Science, Vol. I, pp. 153, 472, 478; Vol. II, p. 640; Vol 
III, pp. 19, 139, S65, 782, 895). 

6. The Movement for a Third Term for Grant: Sparks, pp. 165-172; 
Stanwood, James G. Blaine, pp. 225-231; Andrews, pp. 307-312; Sherman, 
pp. 766-774; A. Badeau, Grant in Peace, pp. 319 ff.; series of articles for and 
against a third term, by G. S. Boutwell, J. S. Black, E. W. Slaughter. 
and Timothy Howe {North American Review, Vol. CXXX, pp. 116, 197, 224, 
37©). 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 

A People's President 

595. Cleveland's Idea of the Presidency. In a book of essays 
called "Presidential Problems," written in 1904, some years after 
his retirement from public life, Mr. Cleveland spoke of the presi- 
dency as "preeminently the people's office." His administration of 
that office during the two terms 188 5- 1889 and 1893-1S97 proved 
the' sincerity of his remark, for he acted always as the head of the 
nation, even when such action threatened to cost him the leadership 
of his party. He did not believe that the people, in choosing a 
president, simply designated a man to sit at his desk in the White 
House and sign the bills which Congress passed up to him and make 
the appointments to office which the managers of the party dictated 
to him. Cleveland's exalted view of the independence and re- 
sponsibility of the president was partly a result of his directness 
and decision of character and partly due to the fact that his political 
career had been occupied solely with executive duties — as sheriff, 
mayor, and governor. 

596. His Quarrel with the Senate. It was inevitable that Presi- 
dent Cleveland should come into conflict with Congress. The Demo- 
cratic House which had been chosen in the election of 1884 expected 
him to sweep the Republicans out of all the offices which they had 
held for a quarter of a century ; while the Republican Senate, whose 
consent was necessary for all the President's appointments, reminded 
him that the Mugwump vote, which had elected him, had been cast 
by Republicans who believed him an unpartisan reformer of the 
tariff and the civil service. When the President chose two cabinet 
members^ from states of the lower South and divided the chief 
foreign missions and consulships between the North and the South, 

1 These were L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, and Augustus H. 
Garland of Arkansas, Attorney-General. 

418 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 



419 



as a pledge of the cessation of sectional bitterness, he was assailed for 
intrusting the offices of government to " ex-Confederate brigadier 
generals." When his sense of justice led him to remove several 
federal officers, especially postmasters, who had used their office 
unblushingly for campaign purposes, he was accused of going back 
on his public profession of devotion to the principles of civil service 
reform. The Senate made a direct issue with the President early 
in 1886 over the removal of 
District Attorney Dustin of Ala- 
bama. Invoking the Tenure of 
Office Act of 1867 (p. 392), the 
Senate refused to confirm the 
nomination of Dustin's succes- 
sor and called on the Presi- 
dent, through Attorney-General 
Garland, for the papers relating 
to the dismissal. Cleveland, be- 
lieving that the Tenure of Office 
Act was unconstitutional, replied 
that his power of removal was 
absolute, refused to furnish the 
papers, and added that "no threat 
of the Senate was sufficient to 
discourage or deter" him from 
following the course which he 
believed led to "government for 

the people." A bitter fight followed in the Senate, during which Cleve- 
land was roundly abused and his Attorney-General formally censured. 
But the President won and had the satisfaction of seeing the Tenure 
of Office Act repealed by Congress (March 3, 1887). 

597. The Presidential Succession Act. In the same year the 
Presidential Succession Act was passed, providing that in case of 
the death or disability of both president and vice president the 
succession should go to the officers of the cabinet in the order of 
the creation of their departments (State, Treasury, War, etc.), in- 
stead of to the president pro tempore of the Senate and after him 
to the Speaker of the House, who might both be of the opposite 
party to the president. Vice President Hendricks had died in 




GROVER CLEVELAND 



420 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

November, 1885, and tJie Senate had chosen John Sherman as presi- 
dent pro tempore, thus putting a prominent RepubHcan in line for the 
presidency, under the old law of 1792, in case of Cleveland's death 
or disability. 

598. The Problem of the Surplus. Important as Cleveland re- 
garded his contest for the restoration of the independence and dignity 
of the executive office, — so completely overshadowed by Congress 
since the Civil War, — he felt that his chief duty was the protection 
of the public purse by the strictest administration of the govern- 
ment's finances. The unexampled prosperity of our country after 
the recovery from the panic of 1873 had created so much wealth 
at home and stimulated such a volume of foreign trade that the tariff 
duties and revenue taxes brought into the Treasury every year far 
more than enough money to run the government. From $102,000,000 
in 1870 the surplus grew to $145,000,000 in 1882, and in the three 
years following the government rolled up balances totaling $300,- 
000,000. This large surplus was an evil in itself because it withdrew 
millions of dollars from the channels of business to lie idle in the 
vaults of the Treasury ; and it was also the proof of a greater 
evil still, the excessive taxation of the people. Now the accumula- 
tion of a surplus could be remedied in either of two ways, — the 
government might increase its expenses or it might decrease its 
revenues. Obviously, only the latter way would lessen the burden 
of taxation. 

599. Ways of reducing the Surplus. It would seem as if the 
most natural thing for the government to do with its surplus would 
be to pay off its debts, as an honest man would do. But the matter 
was not so simple as an individual transaction would be. The 
government's debt was largely in the shape of bonds, which were 
held as safe investments by people at home and abroad and which, 
on account of our general prosperity, were selling at a high figure. 
For the government to step into the market and buy back its own 
bonds from the public at a premium would not only mean con- 
siderable loss to the Treasury but would deprive the public of one 
of its best forms of investment as well. Besides, as the bonds were 
the security on which the notes of the national banks were issued 
(P- 359)> to call in and cancel the bonds would mean to re- 
duce the circulation of bank notes, just at a time, too, when more 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 421 

currency was needed for the volume of the country's trade,^ There 
were other ways in which the surplus might be spent besides extin- 
guishing the national debt. Congress might appropriate large sums for 
the improvement of rivers and harbors, for coast defenses and a new 
navy, for education in the South, or for increased pensions to veterans 
of the Civil War. This idea of the public Treasury, however, as a boun- 
tiful source of wealth for encouraging the development of our coun- 
try — the old "American system" of Henry Clay and the Whigs — 
was opposed to all the tradition and practice of the Democratic 
party. Cleveland phrased the matter neatly in one of his epigrams, 
'' The people must support the government, but the government must 
not support the people." 

600. Cleveland's Fight for Tariff Reform. The best remedy, 
then, for the disposal of the surplus, the remedy which would both 
relieve the people of undue taxation and remove from Congress the 
temptation to squander the people's money, was the reduction of 
the tariff. To this end Cleveland devoted the chief energies of his 
administration. He began the attack on the protective tariff in his 
first annual message to Congress (December, 1885), but the House 
refused by a vote of 157 to 140 to consider any bill for revision. In 
December, 1886, the President returned to the attack, pointing to 
a surplus of $93,956,588 for the fiscal year and calling the protec- 
tive tariff a '"ruthless extortion" of the people's money. The next 
year he so far departed from precedent as to devote his entire annual 
message (December, 1887) to the tariff situation. He declared that 
it was not a time for the nice discussion of theories of free trade 
and protection. It might, or might not, be true that a protective 
tariff made American wages higher, kept our money in our own 
country, built up a market for American manufactures, and made us 
independent of foreign nations for the necessities of life. He did 
not advocate free trade. He only insisted that the people were 
being overtaxed by a tariff that was ''vicious, illegal, and inequi- 
table," and that the surplus must be reduced at once. '' It is a con- 
dition that confronts us, and not a theory," he wrote. 

1 In spite of these considerations the government bought bonds to the value of $50,000,000 
in 1SS6, $125,000,000 in 1S87, and $130,000,000 in 1SS8. The bank-note circulation was 
reduced $126,000,000 between 1886 and 1S90. This lack of notes, however, was largely 
remedied in 1886 by the issue of silver certificates by the Treasury in denominations of $1, 
$3, and $s. 



42 2 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

601. Defeat of the Mills Bill, By dint of much persuasion Cleve- 
land got the House to pass a tariff bill, framed by Roger Q. Mills 
of Texas, reducing the duties by some 7 or 8 per cent. But the 
Republican Senate refused to agree, and the rates remained as 
they were under President Arthur. Cleveland had spent his entire 
term fighting for a reduction of the tariff, and lost. His daring mes- 
sage of 1887, written in spite of the protests of the manufacturing 
interests in the Democratic party, was taken up by the Republican 
campaign orators and pamphleteers and attacked as a free-trade 
document which showed hostility to the prosperity of American in- 
dustry and indifference to the welfare of the American wage earner. 
The presidential campaign of 1888 was waged entirely on the issue 
of the tariff, in the very days when the Mills Bill was before Con- 
gress. The Republican platform declared, ^^We favor the entire 
repeal of internal taxes rather than the surrender of any part of 
our protective system." On this platform they won. In the four 
revisions of the tariff made previous to the Underwood Bill of 1913 
(the McKinley Bill of 1890, the Wilson-Gorman Bill of 1894, the 
Dingley Bill of 1897, and the Payne-Aldrich Bill of 1909) the duties 
were kept at figures averaging nearly 50 per cent, — the highest 
duties in our history. 

602. The Tariff and the Trusts. Had Cleveland's fight for the 
reduction of the tariff come ten years earlier, it would have had a 
better chance for success. But in the decade which had followed 
the election of Hayes a process had been going on which gave great 
strength to the protectionist policy. This was the consolidation 
of business interests into large corporations, or " trusts." ^ By the 
end of Cleveland's first administration the great ''coal roads" of 
Pennsylvania (the Erie, the Lehigh Valley, the Pennsylvania, the 
Lackawanna) had got control of practically all the anthracite-coal 
beds in the country. The lumber men, the whisky distillers, the oil, 
lead, and sugar refiners, the rope makers, the iron smelters, with 
many other "captains of industry," were consolidated into great 

1 The " trust " (or board of trustees) was originally a body of men holding in trust the 
certificates of stock of various companies included in a combine. This form of consolidation 
was declared illegal in the eighties, but the great industrial and transportation companies 
still continued, through the purchase of the majority of the stock of the smaller companies, 
or through management of them by identical boards of directors, to control business and 
prices as before. The name " trust '' is commonly applied to any combination large and 
wealthy enough to tend to monopolize the production and distribution of any commodity 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 423 

trusts. These trusts by no means created the policy of high protec- 
tion, which had been advocated for decades by the manufacturers of 
the North, but they exerted an influence in Congress against the 
reduction of the tariff, 

603. The Demands of Labor. The consolidation of capital in 
great corporations was attended in the same epoch by combinations 
of laborers for the securing of adequate wages, a fair working day, 
humane treatment in case of sickness or disability, and protection 
against unmerited discharge. The workers demanded " full enjoy- 
ment of the wealth they create and sufficient leisure to develop their 
intellectual, moral, and social faculties, to share in the gains and 
honors of advancing civilization," For the accomplishment of these 
ends they asked the state and national governments for laws guaran- 
teeing health and safety in mines and factories, prohibiting the em- 
ployment of children, enforcing arbitration of disputes between 
capital and labor, lajdng a graduated tax on incomes, forbidding the 
importation of foreign labor or the employment of convict labor, and 
securing the ^'nationalizing" (that is, the taking over by the govern- 
ment) of the telegraphs, the telephones, and the railroads.^ At the 
same time, with growing numbers and influence, united labor was 
itself guilty of arbitrary and unjust acts, such as the limitation of 
output and the denial of the "right to labor!" to nonunion workers. 

604. Labor and the Government. The strife between capital and 
labor was very bitter in Cleveland's first term. Over 500 labor dis- 
putes, chiefly over wages and hours of work, were reported in the 
early months of 1886 ; and the number of strikes for that year was 
double the number of any previous year.- President Cleveland was 

1 The labor movement became prominent in politics and literature in the year iSS6, when 
Henry George, the author of " Progress and Poverty " and an advocate of the " single tax" 
(a tax on land only and not on industry or commerce), ran for mayor of New York on the 
labor platform. A widely read novel of Edward Bellamy, entitled " Looking Backward," 
pictured the Utopian state of society in the year 2000, when complete cooperation should 
have taken the place of competition and wage struggles. 

" The number of strikes tabulated b)' Adams and Sumner's " Labor Problems" (p. 180), 
is'as follows: 1884, 4S5 ; 18S5, 695 ; 1SS6, 1572 ; 1S87, 1505 ; 18SS, 946. The most serious 
of the strikes of 18S6 culminated in a deed of horror. An open-air meeting in Haymarket 
Square, Chicago, called by anarchists to protest against the forcible repression of the strike 
in the McCormick Reaper Works and to demand an eight-hour day, was ordered by the 
police to disperse. When the police charged, a dynamite bomb was thrown into the midst of 
the squad, instantly killing 7 men and wounding 60 more. W'ith intrepid step the police 
closed their ranks and dispersed the meeting. The ringleaders of the anarchists were arrested, 
and the next year four of them were hanged. 



424 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

greatly concerned over these labor troubles. In the spring of 1886 
he sent to Congress a special message on the subject, — the first presi- 
dential message on labor in our history. The House had already 
appointed a standing committee on labor, and had created (1884) a 
national Bureau of Labor in the Department of the Interior for 
collecting statistics on the condition of wage earners. Cleveland 
now recommended the creation of a national commission of labor, to 
consist of three persons who should have power to hear and settle 
controversies between capital and labor. Congress failed to adopt 
this important recommendation, but several of the states (includ- 
ing Massachusetts and New York) passed laws providing for the 
settlement of labor disputes by arbitration. 

605. The Railroad Problem. The most serious trouble was with 
the railroads. We have already seen in the Granger movement the 
hostility of the Western farmers to the railroads in the early seventies 
(p. 404). As the great wheat and corn fields, the ranches, and the 
mines west of the Mississippi were developed, and the cities of the 
Middle West grew into busy manufacturing and distributing centers, 
the problem of freight transportation became of increasing impor- 
tance. The railways, except for some slight competition on the 
Great Lakes and the Mississippi, had a monopoly of this transpor- 
tation, and their charges were regarded as a tax on the producer 
and the manufacturer, — a tax which the roads could regulate at their 
own good pleasure. Now in matters of taxation the public objects 
both to excessive rates and to a difference in rates for different 
persons, — to extortion and to discrimination. It felt that the rail- 
roads were guilty of the former offense, and knew that they were 
guilty of the latter. It saw their power and wealth rapidly increas- 
ing.^ It saw their influence extending into state legislatures and 
the national Congress. It saw them allying themselves with trusts, 
like the Standard Oil Company, to crush out competition and ruin 
the small producer. It saw them cutting their rates on through hauls 
from Chicago or St. Louis to New York, where there was competition 
with other trunk lines, and making up the loss by charging high 
freights to shippers who depended on one road alone for getting their 
products to the markets. 

1 The railroad mileage doubled in the decade 1870-1880, growing from 53,000 to 100,000 
miles. During the years 1879-1SS4 the mileage increased four times as fast as the population 
of the United States. 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 425 

606. The Granger Laws and the Wabash Case. In all this the 
public, too prone to forget the good which the railroads had done 
in developing the great vacant tracts of the West, judged the rail- 
roads to be guilty of gross injustice and ingratitude. They had been 
granted charters by the states as public benefactors ; they had been 
the recipients of large grants of public lands ; they had been ac- 
corded privileges of tax exemption ; they had been allowed to take 
private property when necessary for the construction of their lines ; 
they had had their bonds guaranteed by the state legislatures. Their 
obvious duty in return for these favors was to give the public the 
best possible service consistent with a fair interest on the actual 
capital invested in their construction and operation. Some of the 
state legislatures, responding to the outcry against the railroads, 
passed so-called Granger Laws, fixing the maximum of rates which the 
roads could charge for freight and storage and compelling equality of 
treatment for all shippers. But when a decision in the United States 
court (Wabash Railroad vs. the State of Illinois) ruled in 1886 that no 
state law could apply to commerce carried on between two or more 
states, the Granger Laws were seen to be utterly ineffective, for no 
railroad of any importance had its traffic confined to a single state. 

607. The Interstate Commerce Act. Now the Constitution 
(Article I, sect. 8, par. 3) gives Congress power "to regulate com- 
merce with foreign nations, and among the several states." By virtue 
of this power Congress passed the famous Interstate Commerce Act 
(or Cullom Act) in February, 1887. The act provided for a com- 
mission of five men, with power to investigate the books of railroads 
doing interstate business and to call the managers of the roads to 
hearings. It forbade any discrimination in rates and required the 
roads to file their tariffs for public inspection. It prohibited the 
"pooling" of traffic^ and the charging of a higher rate on a short 
haul than on a long haul. The commission had no power of jurisdic- 
tion, but only of investigation ; that is, each case against a railroad 
had to be tried in a federal court. The influence of the railroads with 
the courts and the skill of shrewd corporation lawyers in " interpret- 
ing " the rather vague language of the statute reduced the Interstate 

1 By " pooling " is meant dividing the traffic by amicable agreement among the various 
roads which would naturally compete for it. The total profits are then put into a common 
treasury and divided according to the business assigned to each road, It is a device to kill 
competition between the roads. 



42 6 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Commerce Act to a "useless piece of legislation," in the opinion of 
Justice Harlan of the Supreme Court. Yet, for all its failure to con- 
trol the railroads adequately, the act was of great importance. It 
taught the people that our government could and would exert its 
power in the sphere of private industries. It made the railroads open 
their books and publish their rates.^ Most important of all, it 
created a precedent for the government regulation of railroads and 
other corporations and made the more effective legislation that 
followed in the twentieth century seem like the natural extension 
of a policy already firmly established by the government. 

608. Cleveland defeated by Harrison in 1888. President Cleve- 
land came out of the trying circumstances of his first administration 
indisputably the leading man of the Democratic party. Even his 
enemies in the party were obliged to concede his ''unflinching integ- 
rity and robust common sense." He was renominated by acclamation 
in the Democratic national convention held at St. Louis in June, 
1 888. Blaine, his rival in 1884, was absent in Europe on an ex- 
tended trip. He would undoubtedly have been the choice of the 
Republican convention at Chicago had he not written from Florence, 
and again cabled from Paris, his unconditional refusal to take the 
nomination. The convention, passing ovej- the more prominent candi- 
date, John Sherman, selected, at Blaine's suggestion,^ General Ben- 
jamin Harrison, United States senator from Indiana, an able lawyer 
and an honored veteran of the Civil War, the grandson of the old 
Whig hero and president, William Henry Harrison. Cleveland's 
famous tariff message of 1887 was denounced as a free-trade docu- 
ment by Republican orators, and the benefits of a protective tariff 
were lauded in a long cablegram from Blaine, congratulating the 
American workman on his advantages over his European brother. 
Cleveland lost the support of the veterans of the Civil War by his 
veto of a great number of pension bills ^ and by his executive order 

1 During 18S7 and 18SS about 270,000 freight tariffs were filed. At one time they were 
received by the commission at the rate of 500 a day. 

2 After the fifth ballot had been cast a cable message was sent by the convention leaders 
to Blaine, who was visiting Andrew Carnegie at his country seat, Skibo Castle, in Scotland, 
asking him to change his mind and accept the nomination. The answer came : " Too late. 
Blaine immovable. Take Harrison and Phelps." The convention took Harrison and Morton. 

3 In 18S5 nearly three times as many persons were receiving pensions from the govern- 
ment as at the close of the Civil War. In 1S66 our pension charge was ^15,000,000 ; by 1885 
it had grown to $56,000,000. Pensions were obtained by swindling agents on absurd claims, 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 427 

directing that the Confederate flags stored in the War Building at 
Washington be restored to the Southern states from whose regiments 
they had been captured.^ And, finally, in the pivotal state of New 
York, the defection from Cleveland on the national issue of the tariff 
was sufficient to cause his defeat, although the Democratic candi- 
date for governor, David B. Hill, was elected in a campaign involv- 
ing state issues and engendering much bitterness within the party. 
The state went Republican by 13,000 in a total of 1,300,000 votes, 
giving Harrison the presidency. Cleveland's popular vote throughout 
the country, however, exceeded Harrison's by over 100,000 — more 
than double the popular plurality of any successful presidential candi- 
date since 1872. Grover Cleveland returned to private life with this 
splendid indorsement of his policies by his fellow citizens. 

A Billion-Dollar Country i 

609. The Republican Reaction. Although the election of 1888 
gave the Republicans only a narrow majority in Congress and ac- 
tually registered a popular triumph for Cleveland, the Republicans 
proceeded as though they had been swept into office by a tidal wave 
like Jackson's victory of 1828 or the W^hig revolution of 1840. They 
reversed the entire policy of the Cleveland administration, advocating 
large expenditures in the place of public economy, increase in tariff 
rates rather than reduction, a bold, aggressive foreign policy to re- 
place the cautious diplomacy carried on by Cleveland's State Depart- 
ment. The new President was a complete contrast to his predecessor. 
He was a party man, willing to receive and respect the warning sent 
him just after his election by the leader of the Senate, John Sher- 
man : " The President should have no policy distinct from that of 
his party, and this is better represented in Congress than in the 
executive." Courtesy required that Harrison should offer the highest 
position in his patronage to the man who had made him the choice 
of the party. Blaine accepted the portfolio of State and throughout 

Hundreds of pension bills were passed at a single sitting of the Senate. Cleveland insisted 
on investigating each case thoroughly and vetoed 233 out of the 747 pension bills passed 
in his first term. Only one was passed over his veto. 

1 This so-called " Rebel Flag Order " was a blunder on the part of the President. He had 
no authority to restore the flags, which were national property ; and he revoked the order 
when he saw his mistake. In 1905 a Republican Congress passed a bill restoring the "rebel 
flags " to their states, and the bill was signed by a Republican president. 



428 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



the administration completely overshadowed his nominal chief in the 
White House. The Speaker of the House, Thomas B, Reed of Maine, 
was also a masterful, conspicuous figure in the administration. He 
ran the House in such dictatorial fashion that he was nicknamed 
''Czar Reed." When the Democrats sought to prevent a quorum 
by refusing to answer to the roll call. Speaker Reed counted as 
'^ present" all members on the floor of the House. He refused to 
recognize speakers or put motions whose evident intent was to delay 

the business of the House. In a word, 
he made Congress a perfect machine for 
the dispatch of the Republican program 
and elevated the Speaker to a position 
of autocratic power which he held un- 
impaired up to the year 1910.^ 

610. Public Works and Pensions, 
The Republican Congress of 1889- 
189 1, approving the remark of General 
Grant's son that ''a surplus is easier to 
handle than a deiicit," began immedi- 
ately to reduce the surplus by generous 
appropriations. It increased the num- 
ber of steel vessels in the navy from 
three vessels in 1889 to twenty- two in 
1893, putting the United States among 
the half-dozen greatest naval powers of 
the world. It spent large sums on coast defenses, lighthouses, and 
harbors. It repaid the state treasuries some $15,000,000 of the 
direct taxes levied at the beginning of the Civil War. In the matter 
of pensions it was more than liberal. During the campaign, Harrison, 
referring to Cleveland's careful examination of all applications for 
pensions, remarked that it was "no time to be weighing the claims of 
the old soldiers with an apothecary's scales." Congress now proceeded 




BENJAMIN HARRISON 



1 The immense power of the Speaker consisted in the fact that he appointed all the com- 
mittees of the House, that as presiding officer he could recognize, or not, as he pleased, the 
member who rose to speak, and that he was ex officio a member of the Rules Committee, 
v'hich arranges the whole calendar of the house and can keep any bill from " coming up " 
as long as it chooses to. In the spring of 1910 a body of Republican insurgents, with the 
help of Democratic votes, passed a resolution depriving the Speaker (Joseph G. Cannon) of 
some of his power. For example, he was " deposed " from the Rules Committee, which was 
hereafter to be enlarged to fifteen members and elected by the House. 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 429 

to grant them pensions sometimes without weighing their claims at 
alL The disbursements for pensions rose during Harrison's term 
from $88,000,000 to $159,000,000 annually, — a sum greater than 
the cost of the army and navy of the United States in any year of 
peace during the nineteenth century. 

61 L Our Billion-Dollar Country. Altogether the appropriations 
of Harrison's first Congress reached the $1,000,000,000 mark. When 
the Democrats cried out against '^ the raid on the Treasury " and 
the extravagance of a billion-dollar Congress, Speaker Reed quietly 
replied that it was "a billion-dollar country." If there was some 
carelessness in expenditure it is also true that there was wise and 
patriotic forethought in the Republican program, especially in the 
creation of the nucleus of our magnificent navy. We were rapidly 
growing to be a power of the first magnitude, and our government 
recognized that it must keep abreast with the development of the 
country. The eleventh census (1890), compiled in 25 volumes, re- 
vealed the astonishing prosperity of the United States at the end of 
the first century of its existence under the Constitution.^ Our popu- 
lation was 62,500,000 and our wealth $65,000,000,000. Especially 
noticeable was the concentration of our people in cities. The number 
of cities of over 8000 inhabitants doubled in the decade 1 880-1 890, 
and by the latter year such cities contained fully one half the popu- 
lation of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. 

612. Progress of the South. The census showed also that the 
South was recovering from the ravages of the Civil War and the 
Reconstruction period and was beginning that marvelous career of 
industrial prosperity which has been the feature of our growth in the 
present generation. Encouraged by Northern capital, the South was 
building mills for spinning her own cotton, improving her transporta- 
tion lines by land and water, exploiting the splendid forests of the 
Carolinas and Georgia, and opening the rich deposits of coal and 
iron which stretched in an unbroken line of over 500 miles 
through the highlands from West Virginia to Alabama. By 1890 the 
latter state ranked third in the Union in the production of iron, and 
the South as a whole was producing more coal and iron than the 
whole country had mined twenty years earlier. 

1 A few weeks after his inauguration Mr. Harrison had been the central figure in an 
imposing pageant in New York City in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the 
inauguration of George Washington (April 30, 1789). 



430 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



613. New States in the Northwest. In the Far Northwest the 
tier of territories extending from Minnesota to Oregon were filling 
rapidly with farmers, ranchmen, lumbermen, and miners. The Indian 
frontier had largely disappeared. The reservations were an obstacle 
to the Pacific railroads, and had to go. The government tried to 
break up the tribal organization of the Indians by the Dawes Bill 
of 1887, which granted each head of an Indian family 160 acres of 




THE LOCKS IN THE " SOO " 



The Sault Sainte Marie Canal at the outlet of Lake Superior, through which 
over $40,000,000 worth of merchandise passes annually 



land and American citizenship. The next year some 15,000 Indian 
youths were in government schools, where it was hoped that they 
I would be weaned by the industry and science of the white man from 
the shiftless, roaming, cruel life of the tribe. With the stubborn but 
vain resistance of the Sioux of Dakota, in 1890, to the advancing tide 
of civilization our great Indian wars were at an end. By that date 
the territories of the Northwest had already become states of the 
Union. On November 2, 1889, President Harrison proclaimed the 
admission of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington, 
and the next year Idaho and Wyoming were added. An unbroken 



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THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 431 

tier of states reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific.^ Politics also 
figured in the admission to statehood of the six territories of the 
Northwest. The Republicans counted on a majority in all of them 
except Montana, as they had been largely settled by pioneers from 
the stanch Republican states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and 
Illinois. As states they were expected to contribute 10 senators and 
5 or 6 representatives to the slim Republican majority in Congress, 
besides adding about 1 5 electoral votes to the Republican column in 
the next presidential year. 

614. The Federal Election Bill. There was no doubt that the 
Southern states were violating both the Fifteenth and the Fourteenth 
Amendment. They were depriving the negro of his vote by fraud, 
force, or intimidation ; and they were still enjoying' a representation 
in Congress based on their total population, black and white. At 
the time of Harrison's election they had over twenty congressmen 
and presidential electors more than the strict enforcement of the 
second section of the Fourteenth Amendment would entitle them 
to. Accordingly, the Republican House of 1890 passed the Federal 
Election Bill (called by the Democrats the "Force Bill"), providing 
that, on the petition of 500 voters, federal agents should supervise 
the national elections in any district. In the more conservative 
Senate the bill, which would, have fanned into flame again the dying 
embers of sectional bitterness, was fortunately defeated, and the 
attempts of the North to compel the South to allow the negro to 
vote ceased. - 

1 The government purchased from the Indians the district of Oklahoma ("the beautiful 
land ") in Indian Territory and opened it for settlement at noon, April 22, 1SS9. A horde of 
pioneers, who had been waiting anxiously on the borders, swarmed into the coveted territory, 
and before night several " cities " were staked out. In 1890 the only territories that remained 
within the limits of the United States were Utah, Oklahoma, Indian Territory, Arizona, and 
New Mexico. Utah was entitled to statehood by its population, but the existence of the 
Mormon institution of polygamy prevented its admission until the Mormon Church prom- 
ised to abolish polygamy (1S95). Oklahoma and Indian Territory were combined and 
admitted as the state of Oklahoma in 1907. In 1912 New Mexico and Arizona were admitted 
to statehood after a long controversy over the proposed union of the territories. With the 
admission of New Mexico and Arizona we have a solid band of forty-eight states from ocean 
to ocean, and our only territories (Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico) are rather of the nature of 
foreign colonies. 

- Most of the .Southern states have framed constitutions since 1S90 containing clauses 
which practically disqualify the negro, for a while at least. For example, in the Louisiana 
Constitution of iSqS the famous "grandfather clause" restricts the suffrage to those who 
havje certain educational and property qualifications or who are sons or grandsons of the 
legal voters of January i, 1S67. Under this clause the negro registratioa was reduced in 



i 



432 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

615. The McKinley Tariff Bill. The Republican platform of' 
1888 pledged the party to a high protective tariff. In the spring of: 
1890, therefore, William McKinley of Ohio, chairman of the Com- 
mittee on Ways and Means, introduced into the House the tariff bill I 
which bears his name. Duties were increased on almost all articles! 
of household consumption, — food, carpets, clothing, tools, coal, wood,, 
tinware, linen, thread. Prices rose immediately. Wage earners felt: 
the pinch throughout the country. The opponents of protection! 
claimed that the tariff benefited the trusts alone ; that the increased I 
American capital due to the tariff went into the pockets of the manu- 
facturers as profits, not to the workers as wages. 

616. The Sherman Silver Act. So perfect was the Republican! 
control of the House under the Reed rules that the important: 
McKinley Bill was passed in less than two weeks. In the Senate, 
however, it was held up for four months. Seventeen of the forty- 
seven Republican senators came from farming and mining states west 
of the Mississippi. They were not much interested in high protec- 
tion, but some of them were very much interested in silver mining. 
They thought Congress ought to "protect" silver as an American 
product just as much as wool or iron. This could not be done by 
any kind of tariff legislation, but the government might purchase 
enough silver to keep the price of the metal from falling in the gen- 
eral market. Although by the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 (p. 407) 
the government had for twelve years been purchasing silver at the 
rate of $2,000,000 a month, the price of the metal declined steadily. 
The silver miners clamored for the government to buy still more, 
even to take all the silver that should be brought to the mints. In 
order to win the Western votes for the tariff and also to " do some- 
thing for silver" as an American product, Congress in 1890 passed 
the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, by which it pledged the govern- 
ment to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver every month at the market 
price (at that time about a dollar an ounce), and issue legal-tender 

Louisiana from 127,000 in 1S96 to 5300 in 1900. The Supreme Court has refused to pro- 
nounce on the constitutionality of such proceedings, — in other words, has "let the South 
alone," which is all that it asks. The cause for this complacency on the part of the North is 
probably chiefly the large investments of Northern capital in Southern industries, and the 
consequent desire to have business undisturbed by political wranglings. It may be that the 
idea of a tardy reparation for the injuries done the South in the Reconstruction days also 
influences the Northern attitude. 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 433 

treasury notes to the full amount of the silver purchased. The 
government stored the silver in its vaults, and, as the price kept 
declining in spite of its large purchases, it saw its accumulating stock 
constantly shrinking in value. 

617. The "Tidal Wave" of 1890. The congressional election 
of 1890 resulted, as mid-term elections very frequently do, in the 
defeat of the party in power. Charging the Republicans with extrava- 
gance (pension bills), sectionalism (''Force Bill"), and surrender to 
the trusts (McKinley Bill), the Democrats called on the country 
to rebuke the administration. And the country, influenced mainly 
by the high prices following the new tariff act, returned 235 Demo- 
crats to Congress against 88 Republicans. For the remaining two 
years of Harrison's term nothing in the way of legislation could be 
accomplished. The large Democratic majority in the House frus- 
trated the administration's plans, while the Senate, with its Repub- 
lican majority of six, kept the House from repealing the high tariff 
legislation. All interest in these years centers in the foreign policy 
of the country, where the executive and the Senate could act un- 
hampered by the House. 

618. Pan-Americanism and Reciprocity. It will be remembered 
that Blaine, during his few months of vigorous service as Secretary 
of State in Garfield's cabinet (1881), had tried to increase our in- 
fluence in Central and South America by securing control of the 
Isthmian Canal route and by negotiating reciprocity treaties of com- 
merce between the United States and the Latin-American republics 
(p. 412), In Harrison's cabinet Blaine resumed his active policy. 
A Pan-American Congress (already proposed in 1881) met at Wash- 
ington in October, 1889. It was composed of delegates from nineteen 
countries of Latin America, The subjects discussed were mutual 
trade regulations, a uniform standard of weights and measures, a 
common currency, and a code for the arbitration of the frequent 
quarrels among the Latin republics. A Bureau of the American 
Republics was founded at Washington to keep us informed of the 
fortunes of our sister states in the tropics. Blaine labored hard, but 
in vain, to get his reciprocity doctrine incorporated into the 
McKinley Tariff Bill. 

619. The Samoan Islands. Diplomatic quarrels with Germany, 
Great Britain, Italy, and Chile brought us at times to the verge of 



434 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

war during Harrison's administration. The Samoan Islands in the 
Pacific Ocean were occupied on a '' tripartite " agreement between 
Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Prince Bismarck, 
the German chancellor, was anxious to build up a large colonial 
empire to rival Great Britain's. Acting under his orders the German 
consul in Samoa schemed to oust the British and Americans, He 
raised the German flag over Apia, the chief town of the islands, set 
up his own " king," declared war on the rightful king in the name of 
his Majesty the German emperor, and prepared to shell the villages 
which resisted him. American warships were hurried to Apia, and the 
decks were cleared for action, when a terrific typhoon struck the 
harbor (March i6, 1889), capsizing the German and A«ierican ships 
or dashing them on the beach and the coral reefs. A conference 
followed at Berlin the next month, in which the chancellor recog- 
nized the neutrality of the islands and the full rights of England 
and the United States in the protectorate over the native king. It 
was the first conspicuous participation of our country in ^* world 
politics," and it was also a spur to the construction of an adequate 
navy. By the end of the following year Congress had appropriated 
$40,000,000 for the building of new warships, and before the end 
of Harrison's administration we had risen from the twelfth to the 
fifth place among the naval powers. 

620. The Seal Fisheries in Bering Sea. Blaine had inherited 
from the Cleveland administration a dispute with Great Britain 
over the seal fisheries in Bering Sea. He contended that Bering Sea 
was a mare clausum ("closed sea"), appertaining entirely to Alaska, 
and hence within the sole jurisdiction of the United States. The 
British claimed that it was the " high sea " and that our jurisdiction 
extended only to the ordinary three-mile limit from shore. Under 
executive orders our revenue cutters seized eight British sealing ves- 
sels during the summer of 1889, all outside the three-mile limit, and 
Blaine addressed the British premier. Lord Salisbury, in language 
which drew in reply a virtual threat of war (June, 1890). On sober 
reflection our government receded from its dictatorial position and 
agreed to submit the whole matter to arbitration. The tribunal, 
which met at Paris in 1893, decided every point against us. Bering 
Sea was declared open, and we were forced to pay damages for the 
seizure of the British vessels. 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 435 

621. Quarrels with Italy and Chile. Serious quarrels with Italy 
and Chile also disturbed the Harrison administration. In the former 
case the Italian government, not understanding that our federal ad- 
ministration has no concern with the criminal jurisdiction of any 
state, demanded that our State Department investigate the lynching 
of some Italians in New Orleans and bring to punishment the guilty 
men. Finally, after diplomatic relations had already been severed 
between Washington and Rome, the Italian government accepted as 
reparation a vote of $25,000 by Congress for the families of the 
murdered men. The trouble in Chile was caused by our minister's 
partiality for the dictator Balmaceda, whom a successful revolution 
of the Congressional party had overthrown. It looked like certain 
war with Chile when, in the autumn of 1 891, an American sailor from 
the cruiser Baltimore was killed in the streets of Valparaiso, and 
the Chilean foreign minister publicly characterized President Har- 
rison's protest to Congress as an ''erroneous or deliberately incor- 
rect" statement. But the firm attitude of our government, coupled 
with patience and considerateness in the negotiations, brought Chile 
to offer the apologies which closed the incident. 

622. The Resignation and Death of Blaine. Blaine's popularity 
was enhanced by his vigorous administration of the Department of 
State. In 1891 there were rumors of his nomination for the presi- 
dency the next year, Blaine himself gave no support to the move- 
ment and even declared early in 1892 that he was not a candidate. 
However, three days before the Republican convention met at Min- 
neapolis (June 4, 1892 ), Blaine suddenly resigned his cabinet position 
in a curt note. His motives have never been fully known. Illness, 
tedium of the cares of office, lack of sympathy with his chief, an 
eleventh-hour desire for nomination for the presidency, have all been 
advanced as the causes for his resignation. At any rate, he received 
only 182 votes in the convention to 535 for Harrison and retired, 
much broken in health, to his Maine home. He died the follow- 
ing January, Blaine's character is one of the hardest to estimate in 
all our history. He was brilliant, able, genial, and brave ; but there 
persistently appears in his character and deeds a mysterious spot of 
moral suspicion that will not " out " with all the washings of friendly 
biographers. He could be mercilessly clear in his exposure of other 
men ; but in his revelation of self there was always a suggestion of 



436 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

fog. On the whole, he- was our most prominent political leader 
between Lincoln and Roosevelt. 

623. The Populist Party. As the presidential campaign of 1892 
approached, it was evident that a new factor of great importance had 
entered our national politics. We have already noticed the activity 
of the Grangers and the Knights of Labor in the seventies and the 
eighties. About 1890 these organizations (expanded already into 
the Farmers' Alliance and the American Federation of Labor) united 
to make a compact political party. They held a national convention 
at Cincinnati in May, 1891, with over 1400 delegates from 32 states. 
They adopted the title of People's party (famiHarly "Populists") 
and drew up a radical platform demanding, among other reforms, the 
free coinage of silver, the abolition of the national banks, a graduated 
income tax, the government ownership of railroads, steamship lines, 
telegraph and telephone service, and the election of United States 
senators by popular vote. The next year they assembled at Omaha 
and nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa for president. 

624. Cleveland reelected in 1892. Meanwhile the Democrats 
were in a quandary. Cleveland was their strongest man, but he had 
enemies among the machine politicians of the East, like Governor 
David B. Hill of New York, while his fearless condemnation of free 
silver made him an impossible candidate in the eyes of the Demo- 
cratic managers in the West. But the very qualities which disquali- 
fied Cleveland in the eyes of the politicians commended him to the 
people. He had been a people's president in 1885 ; he became the 
people's nominee in 1892. In spite of the efforts of the Democratic 
machine politicians to secure anti-Cleveland delegates to the con- 
vention, the tide of popular feeling set stronger and stronger toward 
the ex-President as the day of the convention approached. He was 
nominated on the first ballot, and the following November was 
elected over Harrison by 277 votes to 145, with a popular plurality 
of about 400,000. A Democratic House was reelected, and the Re- 
publicans lost their long hold in the Senate. For the first time since 
Buchanan's day a Democratic administration had a majority in both 
branches of Congress. For the first time also since the election of 
i860 a third party figured in the electoral column. Weaver, the 
Populist candidate, carried the four states of Colorado, Idaho, Kan- 
sas, and Nevada, receiving 22 electoral votes and polling over 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 437 

1,000,000 popular votes. The significance for the Democratic party 
of this radical movement in the West will appear when we study 
the presidential campaign of 1896. 

Problems of Cleveland's Second Term 

625. Difficulties confronting President Cleveland. It is doubt- 
ful if ahy other American president in times of peace had ever had 
to contend with such harassing problems as confronted Grover Cleve- 
land when he was inaugurated for a second time, March 4, 1893. The 
Treasury was nearly empty. The gold reserve, maintained by the 
government to protect its paper money in circulation, had sunk to 
the danger limit. Throughout the country there was serious indus- 
trial depression, due to uncertainty as to how a solid Democratic 
Congress would treat the tariff and to apprehension lest the radical 
Populists of the West should capture the Democratic party. Thou- 
sands of laborers were thrown out of employment just at the time 
when the high prices following the McKinley tariff made their living 
most precarious ; and agitators were ready to organize the discon- 
tented into a crusade against the great capitalist interests, the rail- 
roads, and the protected trusts. 

626. The Gold Famine. The most immediate problem that con- 
fronted the President was the condition of the Treasury. Ever since 
the resumption of specie payments, in 1879, it had been the policy of 
the government (confirmed by an act of Congress in 1882) to keep 
a reserve of at least $100,000,000 in gold for the redemption of any 
of the $346,000,000 in greenbacks still in circulation. By the Sher- 
man Silver Act of 1890 the government was steadily increasing the 
volume of its paper money by issuing legal tender to the value 
of the silver purchased. The greenbacks and notes in circulation 
in 1893 amounted to nearly $500,000,000, all of which the Treasury 
considered itself bound to redeem in gold if the demand were 
made. Now it is a well-known economic law that when currency 
of different grades of value exists in a country, the cheaper kind 
drives the other out of circulation. This means simply that if 
a man has his choice between paying a bill with dollars that he 
knows will always and everywhere be worth 100 cents and dollars 
which he suspects may sometime or somewhere be worth only 50 



438 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

cents, he will part with the latter and save the former. In spite of 
our government's efforts to maintain a " parity," or a constant ratio, 
between silver and gold, silver steadily declined in price, and the 
value of the silver dollar consequently shrank. Banks and indi- 
viduals then began to hoard their gold. The yellow metal threatened 
to disappear from circulation. Just before the passage of the Sher- 
man Act the government was receiving 85 per cent of its customs 
duties in gold ; two years later less than 20 per cent of these pay- 
ments were made in gold. To make matters worse, the uncertainty 
and depression in business made foreigners unwilling to invest in our 
securities, and we had to ship large quantities of gold abroad to pay 
unfavorable trade balances. 

627. The Repeal of the Sherman Act. Two immediate duties 
were before President Cleveland, — to stop the further purchase of 
silver and to replenish the Treasury with gold. To accomplish the 
first of these duties Cleveland called an extra session of Congress in 
the summer of 1893 and asked it to repeal the Sherman Act. The 
repeal passed the House readily, but the senators of the seven " silver 
states" of the West (which contained less than 2 per cent of the 
population of the country) fought the bill for several weeks before 
they yielded. 

628. The Bond Transactions. The replenishment of the gold 
supply, however, proved a more difficult task, which occupied the 
entire administration. Twice during the year 1894 the Secretary 
of the Treasury sold $50,000,000 worth of bonds for gold, without 
helping matters much. For the buyers of the bonds simply presented 
greenbacks at the Treasury for redemption, to get the gold to pay for 
the bonds. They thus took out of the Treasury with one hand the 
gold they put in with the other. Determined to stop this " endless- 
chain" process of the withdrawal and the restoration of the same 
millions continually, Cleveland early in 1895 summoned to the White 
House Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful financial figure 
in America. Mr. Morgan arranged with the President to furnish the 
Treasury some $62,000,000 in gold in return for the government's 
4 per cent bonds. The price Mr. Morgan charged for the gold se- 
cured him the bonds at a considerably lower figure than the public 
were paying for them at the time, and a cry went up from the West- 
ern Democrats and Populists that Cleveland had entered into an 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 



439 



r p^ 



unholy alliance with the money lenders and was squandering the 
country's resources to enrich the bankers of New York and London. 
If Mr. Morgan did drive a hard bargain with the government, he at 
least secured an actual supply of gold for the Treasury (one half the 
amount being obtained from foreign bankers) and went to con- 
siderable expense to prevent the shipment of gold abroad. The 
President defended himself for entering into this private bargaining 
for gold on the ground that the state 
of the Treasury was desperate and 
that the people had twice within a 
year given proof of their unwillingness 
to part with their gold hoardings to 
strengthen the credit of the govern- 
ment.^ Altogether during Cleveland's 
administration the government issued 
bonds to the amount of $262,000,000 
in order to attract enough gold to keep 
the reserve up to the $100,000,000 
mark. The election of 1896, which 
was fought on the currency issue, re- 
sulted in the defeat of silver, and gold 
came out of hiding. 

629. The Wilson-Gorman Tariff. 
Although Cleveland was elected in 
1892 chiefly on the tariff issue, his efforts to get from Congress a 
purely revenue tariff were no more successful than they had been in 
1888 (p. 422). William L. Wilson of West Virginia introduced a bill 
in December, 1893, providing for the removal of duties on raw mate- 
rials (wool, iron ore, coal, lumber, sugar) and a considerable reduc- 
tion in the duties on manufactured articles (china, glass, silk, cotton 
and woolen goods) . The bill promptly passed the House by 204 votes 
to no, but when it reached the Senate it was ''held up." It made 
no difference that the Senate was Democratic. The "coal senators" 

1 Opinion will always be divided on the wisdom of Cleveland's action. It cost him the 
bitter hostility of the West, but it satisfied his own conscience. He concludes the chapter 
on The Bond Issues in his " Presidential Problems" (1904) with the words, "Though Mr. 
Morgan and Mr. Belmont and scores of others who were accessories in these transactions 
may be steeped in destructive propensities and may be constantly busy in sinful schemes, 
I shall always recall with satisfaction and self-congratulation my association with them at a 
time when our country sorely needed their aid." 




Copyright, Pach Brothers 

J. PIERPONT MORGAN 



440 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

of West Virginia, the ''iron senators" of Alabama, the "sugar 
senators" of Louisiana, the "lumber senators" of Montana, all 
fought for the protection of their " interests." Under the lead of the 
Democratic Senator Gorman of Maryland (heavily interested in the 
sugar trust) the Wilson Bill was "mutilated" beyond recognition by 
over 600 amendments. Only wool and copper were left as free raw 
materials, and the average of the duties was as high as under the Re- 
publican bill of 1883. It was still a "protective" tariff. The House 
reluctantly yielded, to save a deadlock, but President Cleveland 
refused to sign the bill, which he called a piece of "party perfidy and 
dishonor." It became a law (July, 1894) without his signature. 

630. The Income Tax Decision. To make up for an anticipated 
loss of some $50,000,000 in tariff duties, the Wilson Bill contained a 
provision for a tax of 2 per cent on incomes exceeding $4000. An in- 
come tax ranging from 3 per cent to 10 per cent had been imposed 
by the federal government during the years 1861 to 1872, to help 
meet the tremendous cost of the Civil War ; but the income tax in 
time of peace was resisted as unconstitutional and inquisitorial by 
the wealthy classes, on whom its burden would fall. In May, 1895, 
the Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 5 to 4 (reversing its de- 
cision of 1880), that the income tax was a direct tax :jnd hence could 
be levied only by apportionment among the states according to 
population (Constitution, Art. I, sect. 2, par. 3). Such appor- 
tionment would be impossible, as the wealth of the states bore no 
fair ratio to their population. This decision exempted the wealth 
obtained from rents, stocks, and bonds from contributing to the 
support of the government, while almost every article of consumption 
of the poor laborer was taxed by the tariff. It still further stirred 
the radical temper of the West. The Supreme Court was decried as 
the rich man's ally, and the revocation of its power to pronounce 
laws of Congress unconstitutional was demanded. 

631. Coxey's Army. With the financial and tariff policy of the 
country at sixes and sevens, the administration was still further 
harassed by serious labor troubles. The industrial depression of 1893 
brought failures, strikes, and lockouts in its train. The winter was 
attended with great suffering throughout the country, and tramps 
and vagrants swarmed over the land. An "army" of the unem- 
ployed, led by one Jacob Coxey, marched from Ohio to Washington 
to demand that Congress issue $500,000,000 in irredeemable paper 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 441 

currency, to be spent in furnishing work for the idle by improving 
the highways all over the Union. The 'invasion" of Washington 
by "Coxey's army" ended in a farce. As the men marched across 
the lawn of the Capitol on May-day morning their leaders were 
arrested for ''walking on the grass," and the men straggled away 
to be lost in the motley city crowd. 

632. The Pullman Strike. There was nothing farcical, however, 
in the conflict between capital and labor which broke out in Chicago 
that same month of May. The Pullman Palace Car Company, whose 
business had been seriously injured by the hard times of 1893, dis- 
charged a number of employees for whom it had no immediate use 
and cut the wages of the rest. But in view of the fact that the com- 
pany was paying 7 per cent dividends, that it had accumulated a 
surplus of $25,000,000 on a capital of $36,000,000, the workers could 
not see that the company was suffering, and a committee of the 
docked men waited on Mr. Pullman to remonstrate. For this 
"impertinence" three men on the committee were discharged. Then 
nearly all the employees struck. About 4000 of the Pullman em- 
ployees were members of the powerful American Railway Union, an 
organization founded in 1893 under the presidency of Eugene V. 
Debs. The union took up the matter at its June meeting in 1894 
and demanded that the company submit the question of wages to 
arbitration. This Mr. Pullman refused to do. The union then for- 
bade its men to ''handle "the Pullman cars. The boycott extended 
to 27 states and territories, affecting the railroads from Ohio to 
California. But the dire conflict came in Chicago. Early in July 
only 6 of the 23 railroads entering the city were unobstructed. United 
States mail trains carrying Pullman cars were not allowed to move. 
President Cleveland ordered troops to the seat of disturbance, 
and an injunction was issued by the federal court ordering the strik- 
ers to cease obstructing the United States mails. The reading of the 
injunction was received with hoots and jeers. Debs had appealed 
to the strikers to refrain from violence and the destruction of prop- 
erty, but they could not be restrained.^ Trains were ditched, freight 

1 Especially as their number was swelled by thousands of vagrant ruffians and " bums," 
who had been attracted to Chicago by the great Columbian Exposition of the preceding 
summer. This so-called "World's Fair" of 1893, in celebration of the four-hundredth anni- 
versary of the discovery of America, was a veritable fairyland of dazzling white buildings, 
softened by fountains and lagoons. The Exposition cost about $30,000,000 and was visited 
by over 12,000,000 people. 



442 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



cars destroyed, buildings burned and looted. At one or two points 
it became necessary for the federal troops to fire on the mob to 
protect their own lives. Debs and his chief associates were arrested 
and imprisoned for contempt of court in not obeying the injunction. 
633. Consequences of the Strike. The strike was broken by the 
prompt action of the government, but it left ugly consequences. 
For the first time in our history federal troops had fired upon 
American citizens to preserve order. Governor Altgeld of Illinois, who 







y ^ 1 ijii 






4i — ^^1- --- 





COURT OF HONOR, COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION 

had pardoned the anarchists of the Haymarket riot (p. 423, note 2), 
took the President severely to task for sending troops into the state, 
declaring that " Illinois was able to take care of herself " ; and he was 
generally supported by the Populist element of the West, while even 
among the conservatives of the East there was grave complaint of the 
injustice and danger of ''government by injunction."^ The discon- 
tent of the radicals with the administration was still further increased 
when the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision up- 
holding the sentence of the Chicago federal judge against Debs, just 



1 By an " injunction " a judge "enjoins" certain persons not to commit an act which he 
has defined in advance as punishable. If the person disobeys the judge's order, he is fined or 
even committed to prison for " contempt of court," instead of being duly tried and sentenced 
for the act itself. The judge by this procedure becomes both the accuser and the punisher. 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 443 

one week after its condemnation of the income tax provision of the 
Wilson-Gorman Act as unconstitutional (May 27, 1895). 

634. The Discontent of the Radicals. On March 4, 1895, a call 
went out from some " insurgent " congressmen, addressed to the 
Democrats of the nation, declaring that the policy of the administra- 
tion was not that of the majority of the party and urging the radicals 
of the West to organize and take control of the Democratic party. 
The crusaders were ready, — radical Democrats, Populists, National 
Silverites ; it needed only a leader to unite them into a compact army 
against the "money lords" of Wall Street, who, they believed, had 
loaded their farms with mortgages and purchased legislatures and 
courts to thwart the people's will. But before we describe the great 
battle between the East and the West in the election of 1896 we 
must turn for a moment to foreign affairs in Cleveland's second 
administration. 

635. Our Intervention in Hawaii. The little kingdom of the 
Hawaiian Islands in the mid-Pacific had for many years harbored 
American residents, who came first as missionaries, then as planters 
and merchants to exploit the coffee and sugar farms. The Ameri- 
can residents enjoyed rights of citizenship in Hawaii, v/ith the 
franchise, and occupied high offices. Ever since 1854 there had been 
talk of annexation. Early in 1893 the new Queen Liliuokalani, a 
bitter enemy of the whites in the Islands, was deposed for attempting 
to overthrow the Constitution. A provisional government was set 
up by the white inhabitants, and the United States minister, John 
L. Stevens, protected the new government by a detachment of troops 
landed from the cruiser Boston. The Islands were declared a 
"protectorate" of the United States, and the American flag was raised 
over the government buildings. A few days later a treaty of annexa- 
tion was sent by President Harrison to the Senate for ratification 
(February 15, 1893). The United States was to assume the Hawaiian 
debt of $2,000,000 and pa}^ the deposed queen a pension of $20,000 
a year. But before the treaty was ratified Congress expired, and 
Cleveland succeeded Harrison in the White House (March 4, 1893). 
Cleveland withdrew the treaty from the Senate, and after satisfying 
himself through a special commissioner to Hawaii that Stevens had 
acted too zealously in the January revolution, he ordered the flag 
to be lowered from the state buildings and offered to restore Queen 



444 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Liliuokalani to her throne on condition that she should pardon all 
the Americans concerned in the revolution. When the queen refused 
to abandon her cherished plans of vengeance, President Cleveland 
dropped the whole matter. He was abused roundly for ^^ hauling 
down the American ilag " in Hawaii, but he had followed the century- 
old tradition of our Republic in refusing to seize by force the distant 
possessions of weaker nations on the plea of '^civilizing" them.^ 

636. The Venezuelan Boundary Dispute. That the President 
lacked neither force nor courage in dealing with foreign nations, 
however, was amply proved in a serious controversy with Great 
Britain over the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. The South 
American republic of Venezuela borders on the British colony of 
Guiana (see map, p. 503). A chronic boundary dispute between the 
two nations assumed acute form in 1886, when Great Britain main- 
tained that the line of her frontier included some 23,000 square 
miles of territory, containing rich mineral deposits. Venezuela com- 
plained of the rapacity of her powerful neighbor, and diplomatic 
relations between the countries were broken off (February, 1887), 
The United States, by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, had guaranteed 
the integrity of the Latin-American republics by declaring that the 
western continent was closed to any further extension of the Euro- 
pean colonial system. Our State Department offered its friendly 
offices to Great Britain in arbitrating the disputed boundary line, 
but the British government rejected the offer. Lord Salisbury re- 
garded the Monroe Doctrine as an antiquated piece of American 
bravado and declined to view the United States as an interested party 
in the dispute. Importuned by Venezuela, our State Department 
again and again begged Great Britain to arbitrate her claims. In Feb- 
ruary, 1895, Congress took up the matter, and by a joint resolution 
urged the same policy. Still Lord Salisbury remained obdurate ; and 
when Secretary Olney in a rather sharp dispatch (July 20, 1895) 
declared that the United States was "practically sovereign on this 
continent," and that it would "resent and resist any sequestration of 
Venezuelan soil by Great Britain," the British prime minister again: 
replied in polite terms that the dispute was none of our business. 

1 The provisional government maintained itself without much difficulty until the Repub-i 
lican administration which followed Cleveland annexed the Hawaiian Islands to the United 
States, by a joint resolution of Congress (July, 1S98), and later made them a fully organized 
territory with United States citizenship (April, 1900). 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 445 

637. The Monroe Doctrine upheld. But the American people 
believed that the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine was their 
business. In December, 1895, President Cleveland sent a message to 
Congress recommending that we take the decision of the boundary 
between Guiana and Venezuela into our own hands, " fully alive to 
the responsibility incurred and keenly realizing all the consequences 
that may follow," — ■ in other words, even at the risk of war 
with Great Britain. Both Houses of Congress immediately adopted 
the recommendation by a unanimous vote, appropriating $100,000 
for the expenses of a boundary commission. The President's message 
and the action of Congress took the British people by storm. A 
wave of protest against war with their American kindred swept over 
the country. Three hundred and fifty members of Parliament re- 
buked Lord Salisbury's stubborn attitude by sending a petition to 
the President and Congress of the United States that all disputes 
between the two nations be settled by arbitration. The prime 
minister gave way and consented courteously to furnish the American 
boundary commission with all the papers it needed. In January, 
1897, a treaty was signed at Washington, by which Great Britain 

i agreed to submit her entire claim to arbitration ; and on October 3, 
1899, a tribunal at Paris gave the verdict (favorable on the whole 
to Great Britain), fixing the line which had been in dispute for 
nearly sixty years. 

638. Dissension in the Democratic Ranks. The defense of the 
Monroe Doctrine in the Venezuelan controversy was the only official 
action of President Cleveland's second administration (with the 
exception of the opening of the World's Fair at Chicago) that had 
the general approbation of the country. Denounced by the capitalists 
and corporations of the East for his attempt to lower the tariff, and 
by the Populist farmers of the West for his determination to maintain 
the gold reserve, berated by the labor unions for his prompt preserva- 
tion of law and order at Chicago, and threatened with impeachment 
for hauling down the flag which he believed was unjustly raised in 
the islands of the Pacific, Cleveland must have felt relieved as the 
time of his deliverance from the cares of office drew near. 

639. Bryan nominated at Chicago. The convention of the Demo- 
cratic party, which met at Chicago, July 7, 1896, proved to be 
entirely in the hands of the radicals of the West. They rejected by 



446 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



a majority of 150 votes the resolution of the Eastern ''moderates" 
commending the administration of Grover Cleveland. They wrote 
a platform demanding the free and unlimited coinage of silver 
at the ratio to gold of 16 to i "without waiting for the aid or 
consent of any other nations." They condemned the issue of bonds 
in time of peace, denounced government by injunction, and de- 
manded enlarged powers of the federal government in dealing with 
the trusts. The choice of a prominent Eastern candidate for nomi- 
nation, like Senator Hill of New 
York, or ex-Governor Russell of 
Massachusetts, was impossible 
from the first. Among the free sil- 
verites Richard P. Bland of Mis- 
souri, author of the Silver Law 
of 1878, seemed to be the most 
promising candidate until William 
Jennings Bryan of Nebraska 
swept the convention off its 
feet by an oration filled with 
the enthusiasm of a crusader in 
a holy cause. The silverites made 
him the man of the hour, "the 
savior of Democracy," "the new 
Lincoln." He was nominated on 
the fifth ballot amid scenes of 
the wildest enthusiasm. 
640. Bryan and McKinley. Mr. Bryan, born in i860, had hardly 
more than reached the legal age of eligibility for the presidency. He 
was a self-made man, of Spartan simplicity of tastes and unimpeach- 
able personal habits. As a rising young lawyer in Nebraska he had 
made a remarkable campaign for a seat in Congress, turning a Re- 
publican majority of 3000 in his district in 1888 into a Democratic 
majority of nearly 7000 in 1890. He served two terms in Congress, 
then returned to the West to devote himself to writing and speaking 
iii the cause of free silver. His opponent in the presidential race 
of 1896 was Major William McKinley of Ohio, one of the most 
admirable and amiable characters in our history. McKinley could 
oppose to Bryan's four short years of public service a well-rounded 




WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 



447 



career, including meritorious service in the Civil War, fourteen years 
in Congress, and two terms as governor of Ohio. McKinley's nomi- 
nation was secured and his campaign managed by his devoted friend 
Marcus A. Hanna, a prominent business man of Ohio, the very incar- 
nation of that spirit of commercial enterprise which we have seen 
creating the great trusts of the last years of the nineteenth century. 

641. The Free Coinage of Silver. The campaign was fought on 
the issue of free silver. The radical Democrats demanded that the 
government should take all the silver 
presented at its mints and coin it into 
legal currency at the ratio of sixteen 
ounces of silver to one ounce of gold. 
As sixteen ounces of silver were worth 
in the open market only about $ii in 
1896, while one ounce of gold was uni- 
formly worth $20.67, the silverites de- 
manded that our government should 
maintain in circulation dollars that 
were worth intrinsically only about 50 
cents.^ Their arguments for this ap- 
parent folly were that the United States 
was strong and independent and rich 
enough to use whatever metal it pleased 

ior money, without regard to what England, France, or Germany 
did ; that the supply of gold did not furnish sufficient currency 
for the business of the country anyway, and that what there was 
of it was in the hands of bankers, who hoarded it to increase its 
value ; that the farmers and small traders consequently were 
forced to pay an ever-increasing tax in the fruits of their labor 
to meet the interest (reckoned in gold values) on their mortgaged 
farms and shops ; that the Eastern bankers, who alone had the gold 
to buy government bonds, could control the volume of currency, 
which (since the repeal of the Sherman Act in 1893) was based 
increasingly on the national bonds. The unlimited coinage of silver 
would, they thought, break up this monopoly of the nation's money 
lield by a few rich bankers on the Atlantic seaboard. 

1 The value of the silver "dollar" of 371^ grains sank as follows: 1873, ^1-004; 1S75, 
.$0.96 ; 1885, $0.82 ; 1893, #0.60 ; 1894, Jfo.49 (due to the suspension of silver coinage in India 
•in 1893). 




WILLIAM Mckinley 



448 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

642. Bimetallism. The Republicans and the "sound-money" 
Democrats were willing to admit that we needed more currency and 
favored "international bimetallism," or the use of both gold and 
silver by agreement with the leading commercial nations of the 
world. The Republican platform pledged the party to work for 
such an agreement.^ But for the United States alone to adopt the 
double gold and silver standard would be to make us the dumping 
ground for the silver of the world and so ruin our credit that we 
should not be able to sell a dollar's worth of our securities abroad. 

643. The Campaign of 1896. It was a bitter battle between the 
Western plowholder and the Eastern bondholder, Bryan made a 

^whirlwind campaign, traveling i8,ooo miles in fourteen weeks, mak- 
ing 6oo speeches, which it is estimated were heard by 5,000,000 
Americans. He won thousands of converts to the doctrine of free 
silver, but was not able to carry the country in November. In 
a presidential vote of 13,600,000 McKinley won by a plurality of 
about 600,000. Even in McKinley's home state Bryan polled 
477,000 votes to his opponent's 525,000. The electoral vote was 271 
to 176. The election of 1896 was of tremendous importance in our 
history. It split the Democratic party into two irreconcilable camps. ^ 
It signalized the victory in the Republican party of the business 
" power behind the throne " of government. Thousands of Americans 
were ready in 1896 to vote for a party which represented a sane 
opposition to the growing power of the trusts, the monopoly of coal, 
oil, and lumber lands, the nurture of highly prosperous industries 
by a protective tariff which taxed the poor man's food and clothing, 
and the growing influence of railroads, express companies, and other 
corporations with our legislatures. But the true "people's party,"! 
which should have solidified to combat these economic evils, was led 
astray by the glittering oratory of the silver champion. It rallied 
to a platform that was bitterly sectional, to a doctrine that was 
economically unsound, and to a leader who was immature and 

1 Even this concession could not keep the ranks of the Republicans intact. Several 
silver delegates from Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming, including 
four United States senators and two congressmen, seceded from the convention under the 
leadership of Senator Teller of Colorado, who had " been at the birth of the Republican 
party," and voted for every one of its candidates from Fremont to Harrison. 

2 Late in the summer the " gold Democrats " held a convention and nominated General 
John M, Palmer for president. He polled only 134,645 votes. 



1 



THE CLEVELAND DEMOCRACY 449 

untried. "Lunacy dictated the platform," said a Democratic paper 
in New York, ^'and hysteria evolved the candidate." The election 
of McKinley undoubtedly strengthened the influence of the big' 
business interests on our government, but the election of Bryan 
would have opened the way to the repudiation of our financial honor 
in the eyes of the world and to the reign of untempered radicalism 
at home. Confronted with this alternative at the polls, a majority 
of the voters who hesitated were convinced that the choice of 
McKinley was at least the safer course. 

References 

A People's President: D. R. Dewey, National Problems (American Nation 
Series), chaps, ii-viii; H. J. Ford, Tlie Cleveland Era (Chronicles, Vol. XLIV), 
chaps, iv-vii; E. L. Bog.\rt, Economic History of the United States, chaps, 
xxvii, xxbc; A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, 
Nos. 164, 165; H. T. Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, chaps, i, ii, iv; 
Grover Cleveland, Presidential Problems, chap, i; J. F. Rhodes, History of 
the United States from Hayes to McKinley, chaps, xi-xiii; F. L. Paxson, The 
New Nation (Riverside History), chaps, viii-ix; E. B. Andrews, The United 
States in our Own Time, chaps, xvii, xviii; J. W. Jenks, The Trust Problem, 
chaps, x-xii; Adams and Sumner, Labor Problems, chaps, vi-viii; Edward 
Stanwood, History of the Presidency, chaps, xxvii, xxviii; C. D. Wright, 
Industrial Evolution of the United States, chaps, xxiv, xxvi; William Mac- 
Donald, Select Statutes of United States History, i86i-i8g8, Nos. iii, 1x5. 

A Billion-Dollar Country: Dewey, chaps, i, ix-xv; Ford, chap, viii; 
Bogart, chap, xxvi; Hart, Vol. IV, Nos. 166, 170, 178; Peck, chap, v; Andrews, 
chaps. XLX, XX ; Rhodes, chaps, xiv-xvii; P.^xson, chaps, x-xiii; Stanwood, 
chap, xxix; James G. Blaine, chaps, x-xi; American Tariff Controversies in the 
Nineteenth Century, chap, xvi; M.'\cDonald, Nos. 120, 129; J. D. Long, 
The New American Navy, Vol. I, chap, i; Francis Curtis, The Republican 
Party, chaps, ix-x; R. T. Ely, Monopolies and Trusts, chap, vi; James Bryce, 
The American Commonwealth (enlarged edition of 1911), Vol. II, chap, xciii. 

Problems of Cleveland's Second Term: Dewey, chaps, xvi-xx; Financial 
History of the United States, chap, xix; Ford, chaps, ix-x; Hart, Vol. IV, 
Nos. 171, 179, 194; Peck, chaps, vii-xi; Andrews, chaps, xxi-xxvi; Rhodes, 
chaps, xviii-xx; Paxson, chaps, xiv, xv; Cleveland, chaps, ii-iv; Stanwood, 
Presidency, chaps, xxx, xxxi; Tariff Controversies, chap, xvii; MacDonald, Nos. 
98, 100, 102, 103, 117, 125, 126, 130; F. W. Taussig, The Silver Situation in the 
United States {Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. VII, 
pp. 1-118) ; J. W. Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient, chap, xi; 
W. J. Bryan, The First Battle, chaps, ix-xi, xlix-1; F. J. Stimson, The Modem 
Use of Injunctions {Political Science Quarterly, Vol. X, pp. 189-202) ; W. H. 
Harvey, Coin's Financial School. 



450 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. Tlie Formation of the Trusts: R. T. Ely, Labor Movement in America, 
pp. 1-38; H. D. Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth, pp. 373-388; Henry 
Seager, Introduction to Economics, pp. 476-509; Bogart, pp. 400-416; Dewey, 
National Problems, pp. 188-202 ; Burton Hendrick, The Age of Big Business 
(Chronicles, Vol. XXXIX). 

2. "Czar" Reed: Dewey, pp. 152-156; Peck, pp. 198-201; Andrews, 
pp. 562-564; M. P. FoLLETT, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, 
pp. 185-214; articles for and against Reed's methods, in the North American 
Review, Vol. CLI, pp. 90-111, 237-250; T. B. Reed, A Deliberative Body 
(a defense in the North American Review, Vol. CLII, pp. 148-156). 

3. The New South: P.-^xson, pp. 192-207; Bryce (ed. of 191 i), pp. 491-51 i; 
E. S. Murphy, Problems of the Present South, pp. 11-27, 97-io3; Hart, The 
Southern South, pp. 218-277; editorials in the Outlook, Vol. LXXXVIII, 
pp. 760-761; Vol. XCII, pp. 626-629; the Review of Reviews, Vol. XXXIII, 
pp. 177-190; series of articles, with interesting illustrations, in the World's Work, 
Vol. XrV (the Southern number, June, 1907). 

4. The Knights of Labor: Ely, Labor Movement, pp. 75-88; Wright, 
pp. 245-263 ; Reports of the United States Industrial Commission, Vol. XVII, 
pp. 3-24; T. V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, pp. 186-196; The Organiza- 
tion of Labor {North American Review, Vol. CXXXV, pp. 118-126). 

5. The Venezuelan Controversy: J. B. Henderson, American Diplomatic 
Questions, pp. 411-442; Cleveland, pp. 173-281; Peck, pp. 412-436; Mac- 
DoNALB, Ne. 126; Hart, Contemporaries, Vel. IV, No. 179; A. D. White, Aute- 
Hography, Vol. II, pp, 117-126. 



\ 



C( 



CHAPTER XIX 
ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

The Spanish War and the Philippines 

644. The Island of Cuba. Thrusting its western end between 
the two great peninsulas of Florida and Yucatan, which guard the 
entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, lies the island of Cuba, '' the pearl 
of the Antilles." From the time of its discovery by Columbus down 
to the very close of the nineteenth century Cuba belonged to the 
crown of Spain. Corrupt officials squandered its revenues, raised 
by heavy taxation, and Spanish soldiery ruthlessly quelled the least 
movement of rebellion. The fate of Cuba was a matter of great 
concern to the United States, both because the island lay close to 
our shores and because its possession by a strong or hostile power 
would threaten our interests in the Gulf of Mexico. In the pros- 
perous decades following the Civil War, large amounts of American 
capital were invested in the sugar and tobacco plantations of the 
island. Many Cubans were naturalized in the United States, where 
they established centers of agitation for Cuban liberty. And many 
others, after naturalization, returned to the island under the pro- 
tection of their American citizenship, to aid their brother Cubans 
in throwing off the Spanish yoke. 

645. The Insurrection of 1895-1898. An especially severe in- 
surrection broke out in 1895. The insurgents quickly overran nearly 
all the open country, and the Spanish leader. General Weyler, unable 
to bring them to face his 150,000 troops in regular battle, resorted 
to the cruel method of the " reconcentration camps." He gathered 
the noncombatants — old men, women, and children — from the 
country into certain fortified towns and herded them in wretched 
prison pens under cruel officers, where tens of thousands died of hun- 
ger and disease. The cries of the Cuban sufferers reached our 
shores. Scores of American citizens in the island were also being 
thrust into prison, and millions of American capital were destroyed. 

451 



452 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

646. Our Intervention in Cuba. Prudence and humanity alike 
forbade the continuance of these horrible conditions at our very 
doors. The platforms of both the great parties in 1896 expressed 
sympathy for the Cuban insurgents, and both Houses of Congress 
passed resolutions for the recognition of Cuban independence. Presi- 
dent McKinley labored hard to get Spain to grant the island some 
degree of self-government and spoke in a hopeful tone in his message 
to Congress of December, 1897. But in the early weeks of 1898 
events occurred which roused public indignation to a pitch where it 
drowned the voices of diplomacy. On February 9 a New York paper 
published the facsimile of a private letter written by the Spanish 
minister at Washington, Sefior de Lome. The letter characterized 
President McKinley as a " cheap politician who truckled to the 
masses." The country was still nursing its indignation over this 
insult to its chief executive when it was horrified by the news that 
on the evening of February 15 the battleship Maine, on a friendly 
visit in the harbor of Havana, had been sunk by a terrific explosion, 
carrying two officers and 266 men to the bottom. The Spanish 
government immediately accepted the resignation of Senor de Lome 
and expressed its sorrow over the "accident" to the American war- 
ship. But the conviction that the Maine had been blown up from 
the outside seized on our people with uncontrollable force. Flags, 
pins, and buttons, with the motto '' Remember the Maine ! " appeared 
all over the land. The spirit of revenge was nurtured by the " yellow 
journals." Congress was waiting eagerly to declare war. . 

647. War with Spain. After a last appeal to the Spanish govern- 
ment had been met with the evasive reply that the Cubans would be 
granted "all the liberty they could expect," McKinley transferred 
the responsibility of the Cuban situation to Congress in his message 
of April II. Eight days later, on the anniversary of the battle of 
Lexington and of the first bloodshed of the Civil War, Congress 
adopted a resolution recognizing the independence of Cuba, demand- 
ing the immediate withdrawal of Spain from the island, and authoriz- 
ing the President to use the military and naval forces of the United 
States, if necessary, to carry out the resolution. Congress further 
pledged the United States, by the Teller Resolution, "to leave the 
government and control of the island of Cuba to its own people" 
when its pacification should be accomplished. The resolutions of 
April 19, 1898, were a virtual declaration of war against Spain. 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



453 



648, Dewey's Victory at Manila. Our Navy Department, under 
the vigorous administration of Secretary Long and Assistant Secretary 
Roosevelt, was thoroughly prepared for the crisis. The Far East- 
ern fleet had been gathered, under Commodore George Dewey, 
at the British sta- 
tion of Hongkong on 
the Chinese coast. 
Scarcely a week after 
the war resolutions 
had been passed, 
Dewey's ships in 
their drab war paint 
were on their way 
across the 600 miles 
of the China Sea that 
separate Hongkong 
from the Spanish 
colonial group of the 
Philippine islands. 
The last night of 
April, with a bravery 
Mke that of his old 
commander, Farra- 
gut, at New Orleans, 
Dewey ran his fleet 
of armored cruisers 
and gunboats, under 
fire, through the 
fortified passage of 
Boca Grande into 
Manila Bay ; and 
early on May-day 
morning he opened fire on the Spanish fleet anchored off Cavite. 
Five times Dewey led his squadron up and down the line of 
Spanish ships, pouring into them an accurate and deadly fire, 
then drew out of range to give his grimed and hungry gunners their 
breakfast. He returned a few hours later to complete the work of 
destruction. By noon the entire Spanish fleet of ten ships was sunk 
or in flames, the land batteries of Cavite were silenced, and the city 




EASTERN ASIA AND THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS 



454 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



of Manila lay at the mercy of Dewey's guns. The Spanish had lost 
634 men and officers. On the American side, in spite of the constant 
fire of the Spaniards, not a ship was hurt nor a life lost. It was 
the most complete naval victory in our history. 

649. Cervera's Fleet. While the victorious fleet lay in the harbor 
of Manila, waiting for troops from the United States to complete the 
conquest of the Philippines, the Atlantic squadron, acting under Rear 
Admiral William T. Sampson, was blockading the coast of Cuba. 
A Spanish fleet of four armored cruisers and three torpedo de- 
stroyers, commanded by Admiral Cervera, had sailed westward 




THE DEWEY MEDAL 



from the Cape Verde Islands on April 29. There were wild stories 
that Cervera's fleet would shell the unfortified cities along our coast, 
and some timorous families even abandoned their customary summer 
outing at the seashore for fear of the Spanish guns. But experts 
knew that the fleet would put in at some Spanish West Indian port 
for c'oal and provisions after its journey across the Atlantic. In spite 
of Admiral Sampson's diligent patrol, Cervera's fleet slipped by him 
and came to anchor in Santiago harbor, where it was discovered by 
the American lookouts, the last of May, and immediately "bottled 
up" by Sampson's blockading squadron.^ 

650. The Land Campaign in Cuba. Meanwhile about 16,000 
troops had been sent from the American camps in Florida to invade 

1 The fleet included Commodore Schley's "flying squadron" (the cruiser Brooklyn and 
the battleships Massachusetts^ Texas, and Inva) with Admiral Sampson's own squadron (the 
cruiser New York, which was his flagship, and the battleships Indiana and Oregon). The 
Oregon had just completed a marvelous voyage of 14,000 miles in 66 days, from San Fran- 
cisco to Florida, around Cape Horn. She arrived and joined the blockading squadron as 
fresh as if she were just from the docks, '" not a bolt nor a rivet out of place." 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



455 



Cuba, under the command of Major General Shafter. The most 
picturesque division of this army was the volunteer cavalry regiment, 
popularly known as the " Rough Riders," commanded by Colonel 
Leonard Wood, made up of Western cowboys, ranchmen, hunters, and 
Indians, with a sprinkling of Harvard and Yale graduates. Theodore 
Roosevelt resigned his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to 
become the lieutenant colonel of the Rough Riders. In a spirited 
attack, through tangled jungles and over rough fields strung with 
wire fences, the American troops charged up the heights of San Juan 
and El Cane}^ in the face of a _ 

galling fire from the Spanish Mau- 
ser rifles and intrenched themselves 
on the hills to the east of Santiago 
(July I, 2). But General Shafter 
found the defenses of the city too 
strong and notified Washington 
that he should need reenforcements 
to drive General Toral from San- 
tiago. It was a critical position in 
which the little American army 
found itself Sunday morning, 
July 3, on the hills above Santiago. 
Reenforcements would be weeks 
in reaching them. Their supplies 
were inadequate and bad.^ The 

dreaded fever had already broken out among them. And Cervera's 
fleet in the harbor below could easily drive them from the heights 
by a well-directed fire. 

651. The Battle of Santiago. But fortune favored our cause. 
That same Sunday morning the Spanish ships steamed out of the 
harbor and started to run westward along the southern shore of Cuba, 
the flagship Maria Theresa leading and the Vizcaya, the Colon, the 
Oquendo, and the destroyers following. Admiral Sampson, with his 
flagship, the New York, was absent for the moment conferring 
with General Shafter on the critical situation of the American army. 

1 The inadequacy of the War Department, under Secretary Alger, was a striking contrast 
to the efficiency of the Navy Department. The soldiers were supplied with heavy clothing 
for the hot Cuban campaign and with inferior canned meats, which General Miles called 
" embalmed beef." 




.U^' 



THE BLOCKHOUSE AT EL CANEY, 
RIDDLED WITH BULLETS 



456 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Commodore Schley, on the Brooklyn, was left as ranking officer. Fol- 
lowing Sampson's orders, the American ships closed in on the Span- 
iards and followed them in a wild chase along the coast, pouring a 
deadly fire into them all the while. The Spaniards replied, as at Ma- 
nila, with a rapid but ineffectual discharge. One by one the Spanish 
cruisers, disabled or in flames, turned and headed for the breakers, 
until the last of them, the Cristobal Colon, bearing the proud name 
of the man who four centuries earlier had discovered for Spain the 
western world whose last remnants were now slipping from her 
grasp, was beached by the relentless fire of the Brooklyn and the 
Oregon, forty-five miles west of the harbor of Santiago. Only one 
man was killed and one seriously wounded in the American fleet, 
while less than $10,000 repaired all the damage done by the Spanish 
guns. But the enemy's fleet was completely destroyed, over 500 
officers and men were killed, wounded, or drowned, and 1700 taken 
prisoners. The Spanish loss would have been far greater had not the 
American sailors rescued hundreds of their foemen, including the 
brave Admiral Cervera himself, from the burning decks and the wreck- 
strewn waters. A few days later General Toral surrendered the city 
of Santiago, now at the mercy of Sampson's guns, and turned over 
his army as prisoners of war to General Shafter (July 17). 

652. The Capture of Manila. The total loss of two fleets and an 
army brought Spain to sue for terms. The preliminaries for the 
treaty of peace were signed in Washington and hostilities were sus- 
pended August 12. News of the peace reached Porto Rico just in 
time to stop General Miles's advance against the Spanish forces, 
and the governor of Porto Rico immediately surrendered the island 
to the American army. But before the news of peace reached the 
distant Philippines an event of great importance had occurred there. 
Three "relief expeditions," comprising over 10,000 troops, had 
reached the Philippines from San Francisco by the end of July, and 
on August 13 these troops, supported by Dewey's squadron, took the 
city of Manila and raised the American flag over the governor's 
palace. 

653. Emilio Aguinaldo. Then the situation began to grow com- 
plicated. The Filipinos had been in revolt against Spain at the same 
time as the Cubans. In 1897 the Spaniards had bought off the 
leaders of the revolt, including one Emilio Aguinaldo, with a promise 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 457 

of $1,000,000. Aguinaldo had retired to Singapore. While at Hong- 
kong, Dewey had welcomed Aguinaldo as an ally, and later had him 
conveyed back to the Philippines on an American ship and furnished 
him with arms from the arsenal at Cavite. The Filipino troops had 
entered Manila with the Americans on August 13. Aguinaldo now 
claimed that Dewey had promised to turn the Philippines over to him 
when the power of Spain was crushed, but there is no evidence that 
Dewey ever made such a promise. Forced to withdraw from the city 
of Manila (September 15), Aguinaldo organized a Filipino republic, 
had himself proclaimed dictator, and prepared to maintain his posi- 
tion by force of arms. 

654. Peace with Spain. So the American and the Filipino troops 
were facing each other in ill-concealed hostility near Manila when 
the terms of peace between Spain and the United States were signed 
at Paris, December 10, 1898. Spain agreed to withdraw from Cuba 
and to cede Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands to the 
United States. As the war had been begun for the liberation of 
Cuba, and as the city of Manila had not been taken until the day 
after the peace preliminaries were signed and hostilities suspended, 
the Spanish commissioners at Paris were unwilling to have the Philip- 
pines included in the peace negotiations at all. But President 
McKinley and his advisers were unwilling to leave the Islands a prey 
to internal wars or European domination, and Spain consented finally 
to give them up for an indemnity of $20,000,000. 

655. The Philippine Insurrection. Before the treaty was rati- 
fied by the United States Senate or the Spanish Cortes, President 
McKinley ordered General Otis, commanding at Manila, to extend the 
authority of the United States over all the island of Luzon, and the 
Filipino Congress replied by authorizing Aguinaldo to make war on 
the American troops. It came to a battle before Manila on February 
4, 1899. The superior quality and training of the American army 
made victory over the Filipinos in the open field of battle very easy ; 
but when the Filipinos took to a guerrilla warfare among their 
native swamps and jungles, the wearying task of subjugating them 
dragged on for more than two years. Even the tricky seizure of 
Aguinaldo himself in his mountain retreat by a party of American 
scouts disguised as insurgents (February, 1901), and his proclama- 
tion two months later acknowledging American sovereignty in the 



458 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Islands, did not end the insurrection. It was not until April, 1902, 
that the last insurgent leader surrendered and the Philippines were 
officially declared ''pacified." 

656. The Anti-Imperialists. The war in the Philippines was 
carried on against the vigorous protest of the ''anti-imperialists" 
in America, who saw in the acquisition of tropical colonies 
which could never become states of the Union, and in the war 
to "subjugate" the native inhabitants of those colonies, the aban- 
donment of the principles of freedom and self-government on which 
our Republic was founded. President McKinley was invested by 
Congress (March 2, 1901) with "all the military, civil, and judicial 
powers necessary to govern the Philippine Islands," — an "authority 
like that of a Roman emperor rather than of the president of a free 
republic." Our army was rapidly increased fivefold in the Islands 
(from 10,000 troops in August, 1898, to 54,000 in May, 1900), and 
during the severest period of the insurrection (May, 1900- June, 
1901) there were 1026 "contacts," or petty battles, with a loss to 
the Americans of about 1000 men killed, wounded, and missing. 
Moreover, the exasperating method of guerrilla fighting practiced 
by the Filipinos, with its barbarous details of ambush, murder, 
treachery, and torture, tempted the American soldiers to resort at 
times to undue cruelty. The whole business was sickening, even 
to those who believed that it had to be done with all the unrelenting 
firmness that our generals displayed; while the anti-imperialists 
taunted the administration with having converted the war, which was 
begun as a noble crusade for the liberation of the Cuban, into a 
diabolical campaign for the enslavement of the Filipino. 

657. The Admimstration Indorsed. For all that, the country at 
large supported the policy of the McKinley administration. The 
election of 1900, held during the insurrection, was fought chiefly on 
the issue of "imperialism." At the Democratic national convention 
at Kansas City large placards were displayed with the inscription : 
" Lincoln abolished slavery ; McKinley has restored it." A huge 
American flag was floated from the roof girders of the convention 
hall, edged with the motto, "The flag of the republic forever, of an 
empire never." McKinley defeated Bryan by 292 electoral votes to 
155, with a popular majority of nearly 1,000,000. The vote was the 
verdict of the American people that the situation in the Philippines 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



459 



must be accepted as our ^'manifest destiny," or, in the words of 
Senator Spooner, as "one of the bitter fruits of war." 

658. Our Government of the Philippines. President McKinley 
used his extraordinary powers of government in the Philippines with 
admirable moderation and wisdom. As soon as the force of the 
insurrection was broken, he appointed Judge William H. Taft as civil 
governor (July 4, 1901), with a commission of four other experts, 
to administer the departments of commerce, public works, justice, 




AN OLD STREET IN A PHILIPPINE TOWN 



finance, and education in the Islands.^ Native Filipinos were given 
a share in the local government of the provinces, and three Filipino 
members were soon added to the commission. Under Governor Taft's 
strong and sympathetic administration the Islands recovered rapidly 
from the effects of the war. Roads and bridges were built, harbors 
and rivers improved, modern methods of agriculture introduced, 
commerce and industry stimulated." The American government 

1 A commission had been appointed in 1S99 with President J. G. Schurman of Cornell at 
its head, to study the political, social, and economic condition of the Philippines. Its report 
(1901) in four volumes contains the best information on the Islands. 

2 Secretary of War Root estimated that the cost of the Philippines (1S9S-1902) was 
$160,853,512, exclusive of the J?2o, 000,000 purchase money. I\Ir. Edward Atkinson, an 
authority on economics and the leader of the anti-imperialists, claimed that §1,000,000,000 
was not too high an estimate of the cost of the Islands up to 1904. 



46o THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

purchased of the friars some 400,000 acres of Church lands for 
$7,200,000, which it sold to the natives on easy terms ; and sent 
hundreds of teachers to the Philippines to organize a system of mod- 
ern education. A census of the Islands was completed in 1905, show- 
ing a population of 7,635,426, of whom 647,740 belonged to savage, 
or "head-hunting," tribes. Two years after the census was taken, 
an election was held for a Philippine National Assembly, to share 
in the government of the Islands, as a lower House, with the com- 
mission appointed by the President. The Assembly convened in 
October, 1907, ex-Governor Taft (then Secretary of War) visiting 
the Orient to assist at the inaugural ceremonies. The professed 
policy of our government ever since the Spanish Vvar has been to 
give the Filipinos their independence ''when they are fit for it"; 
but as yet we have been unwilling to part with so rich and populous 
a domain as the Philippine Islands or abandon so fine a strategic 
post in the Far East. 

659. The Organization of the Cuban Republic. The reorgani- 
zation of Cuba proceeded more smoothly. On January i, 1899, 
Spain withdrew her civil and military authority from the island, 
leaving it under a military' governor appointed by President 
McKJnley. In November, 1900, a convention of Cubans drew up a 
constitution for a republic, closely patterned on that of the United 
States. Congress established a mild sort of "protectorate" over 
Cuba by compelling the convention to incorporate in the constitution 
certain clauses known as the " Piatt Amendment." They provided 
(i) that Cuba should never permit any foreign power to colonize 
or control any part of the island, or impair in any way its inde- 
pendence ; (2) that Cuba should not incur any debt which the or- 
dinary revenues of the island could not carry ; (3) that Cuba should 
sell or lease certain coaling stations to the United States ; and 
(4) that we might intervene in Cuba, if necessary, to maintain a gov- 
ernment adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual 
liberty. When the Piatt Amendment was duly adopted, the Cubans 
were allowed to proceed with their elections. On May 20, 1902, 
General Leonard Wood turned the government of the island over to 
its first president, Estrada Palma, and Cuba took her place among 
the republics of the world.^ 

1 Under the Piatt Amendment we were obliged to take temporary charge of the govern- 
ment of Cuba from Tqo6 to iQog on account of factional strife in the island and the 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 461 

660. Porto Rico a Colonial Territory. Porto Rico was organized 
(April, 1900) as a sort of compromise between a colony and a ter- 
ritory of the United States. A governor and a council of 11 (includ- 
ing 5 Porto Ricans) were appointed by the President, and a 
legislature of 35 members was elected by the natives. The council 
had full charge of the administration of the island and sitting as an 
upper House could veto the acts of the native legislature. The island 
was put under the protection of our laws and formed a customs dis- 
trict of the United States. On March 2, 19 17, President Wilson 
signed the Porto Rican Civil Government Bill granting United 
States citizenship to the Porto Ricans and replacing the appointive 
council by a senate elected by the people of the island. 

661. The Constitution does not "follow the Flag." While our 
flag was raised in the West Indies and in the distant islands of the 
Pacific, our Constitution was not extended in full force to the new 
possessions. Congress, as we have seen, turned the administration 
of the Philippines over absolutely to President McKinley and devised 
a new form of government for Porto Rico. Furthermore, by the 
famous "Insular Cases" of May, 1901, the Supreme Court decided 
that Congress might impose a tariff duty on the products coming 
from those possessions, thus treating them as foreign countries. 

662. The Spanish War an Epoch in our History. The Spanish 
War, with the resultant acquisition of colonial possessions in the 
tropics, marks a momentous epoch in our history. During the 
twenty-five years preceding the McKinley administration our State 
Department played but a minor role. The question of the seal 
fisheries in Bering Sea, or of the control of a half-civilized king in 
the Samoan Islands, on which Blaine exercised his vigorous 
ability, seem rather petty now ; and even the serious Venezuelan 
boundary dispute with Great Britain was only an episode in the great 
absorbing questions of finance, the tariff, and labor agitation, which 
filled the second administration of Grover Cleveland. But with the 
closing years of the century the nation turned to new fields. Our 
army and navy became conspicuous and began to absorb appro- 
priations reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. 

resignation of President Palma. We have rendered inestimable services to Cuba in the 
way of education and sanitation. Yellow fever, formerly the scourge of the island, has been 
stamped out, and Havana has been converted from one of the filthiest and deadliest cities 
of the Western Hemisphere to one of the cleanest and most sanitary. We spent over 
Si 0,000,000 in the sanitation of Cuba 



462 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Our attention was drawn to the interests of colonizing nations, the 
trade of distant lands, and the fate of the old empires of the East. 
Our new possessions in the Pacific and our concern in the Orient 
gave great impetus to the development of our western coast and 
made imperative the immediate construction of the long-planned 
canal through the Isthmus of Panama. England had been our tradi- 
tional enemy since the days of the Revolutionary War, but her 
cordial support of our cause in the war with Spain, when all the 
other nations of western Europe desired and predicted a Spanish 
victory,^ won our hearty friendship and roused in the breasts of 
statesmen of both countries the prophetic hope that the two great 
English-speaking nations should henceforth be united in their efforts 
for the maintenance of world peace. 

663. Our Influence in the Far East. Only a few months after 
the ratification of the treaty with Spain there came a striking proof 
of our new position in the affairs of the world. An association of 
men in China known as the " Boxers," resenting the growth of 
foreign influence in their country, gained control of the territory 
about Peking in the summer of 1900 and, with the secret sympathy 
of the Empress Dowager of China and many of the high officials, 
inaugurated a reign of terror. The foreign legations were cut off, 
and the German minister was murdered in broad daylight in the 
street. The rest of the foreign diplomats, with their staffs and their 
families, to the number of four hundred, took refuge in the British 
legation, where they were besieged for two months by a force of 
several thousand armed men, including troops from the imperial 
army. Sixty-five of the besieged party were killed and 135 wounded 
before the relief army, composed of American, British, French, 
German, Russian, and Japanese troops, fought its way up from the 
coast and captured the city of Peking. We were in a position, by 
virtue of our occupation of the Philippines, to furnish 5000 troops 
promptly and to take a leading part in the rescue of the legations 
at Peking ; and when our able Secretary of State, John Hay, took the 

1 The friendly spirit of England was, especially shown in the conduct of the fleets in 
Manila Bay. The German admiral, Von Diederich threatened Dewey by unfriendly demon- 
strations and would have effected a combination of the European warships to attempt to 
drive Dewey from the bay or to frustrate his bombardment of Manila had not the British 
admiral openly declared his sympathy for the American cause. When the news of Dewey's 
victory reached London, American flags were hung in the streets and " The Star Spangled 
Banner " was played in the theaters and music halls. 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 463 

initiative in dealing with the question of the adjustment of the out- 
rage and the punishment of China, he won the respectful cooperation 
of the courts of Europe.^ 

664. Adjustment of Domestic Problems. At the same time that 
they opened these new vistas of our national destiny the closing 
years of the century seemed to settle many of the domestic problems 
which had vexed us since the Civil War. The Dingley Tariff Bill 
of 1897 quickly and quietly restored even the slight reduction made 
by the Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894 and fixed our tariff for a dozen 
years. The discovery of large deposits of gold in the Klondike region 
of Alaska in August, 1896 (at the very moment when Mr. Bryan 
was making his whirlwind campaign for free silver), together with 
the opening of new gold mines in South Africa, expanded the 
volume of the world's currency sufficiently to make silver coinage 
a dead issue. A marvelous burst of industrial activity following 
the Spanish War, combined with abundant corn and wheat crops, 
gave employment to thousands who were out of work and enabled 
the farmers of the West in many cases to pay off their mortgages and 
have a balance left with which to buy automobiles. Finally, the 
Spanish War healed the last traces of ill feeling between North and 
South, when the men from Dixie and the men from Yankeeland 
fought shoulder to shoulder under Colonel Roosevelt of New York 
or "little Joe" Wheeler of Alabama. 

665. The United States among the World Powers. For better 
or worse we had begun a new policy of expansion and entered into 
the race for colonial supremacy and world trade. After warning the 
nations of Europe away from the Western Hemisphere for nearly a 
century, we had now ourselves seized on possessions in the Eastern 
Hemisphere. We had inaugurated governments strange to the letter 
and the spirit of our Constitution, We had voted down by large 
majorities the counsel of the men who urged us to return to the old 
order and had accepted as the call of our "manifest destiny" the 

1 The aged senator John Sherman was made Secretary of State by McKinley to make a 
place in the Senate for Marcus A. Hanna. Sherman was unable to manage the trying nego- 
'tiations with Spain and gave way to Judge Day, who in turn resigned, to head the Peace 
Commission in Paris, December, 1S9S. John Hay, our ambassador to England, succeeded 
him and proved to be one of the ablest, if not the ablest, of our Secretaries of State. His 
wisdom and tact preserved the integrity of the Chinese Empire, with the principle of the 
" open door," or equal trade privileges for all nations, at a time when the European powers 
were ready in anger and revenge to break up the empire and unchain war in the East 



464 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

summons to "enlarge the place of our habitation." We had no 
longer the choice whether or not we should play a great part in 
the events of the world. The only question was, in the words of 
Theodore Roosevelt, " whether we should play that part well or ill." 

The Roosevelt Policies 

666. The United States at the Opening of the Twentieth 
Century. When President McKinley was inaugurated a second time, 
on March 4, 1901, the country was at the flood tide of prosperity. 
Capital, which was timidly hoarded during the uncertain years of 
Cleveland's administration, had come out of hiding at the call of 
Hanna and the other '^ advance agents of prosperity." The alliance 
between politics and business was cemented. Trusts were organized 
with amazing rapidity and on an enormous scale. Up to the Spanish 
War there existed only about 60 of these great business combinations 
with a capital ranging from $1,000,000 to $5,000,000, but the years 
1899-1901 saw the formation of 183 new trusts with a total capitali- 
zation of $4,000,000,000, — an amount of money equal to one twen- 
tieth of the total wealth of the United States and four times the 
combined capital of all the corporations organized between the Civil 
War and Cleveland's second administration. The statistics pub- 
lished from year to year by our Census and Treasury Bureaus re- 
vealed such gains in population, production, and commerce that the 
imagination was taxed to grasp the figures, and even the most san- 
guine prophecies of prosperity were in a few months surpassed by 
the facts. From the inauguration of Washington to the inauguration 
of McKinley the excess of our exports over our imports was $356,- 
000,000, but in a single year of McKinley's administration the excess 
reached $664,000,000. By the end of the nineteenth century we were 
mining 230,000,000 of the 720,000,000 tons of the world's coal, 
25,000,000 of its 79,000,000 tons of iron, and 257,000 of its 470,000 
tons of copper, and were steadily increasing our lead over all other 
countries in the production and export of wheat, corn, and cotton. 
During the whole of the nineteenth century we had been a debtor ' 
nation, inviting the capital of Europe to aid in the development 
of our great domain and paying our obligations abroad from the 
yield of our Western fields; but now our land was occupied, our 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



465 



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resources exploited, and our industrial position assured. We began 
to export great quantities of manufactured goods and to seek new 
markets in the far corners of the earth. We bought the bonds of 
China and Japan. We sold millions of dollars' worth of our indus- 
trial stocks to Europe. The king of England received more money 
annually in interest from his private investments in American securi- 
ties at the beginning of the twentieth century than George the Third 
had hoped to wring from the thirteen 
colonies by taxation. 

667. The Assassination of Mc- 
Kinley. The progress of the United 
States and her sister republics of 
Central and South America was cele- 
brated by a Pan-American Exposition 
held at Buffalo in the summer of 
1 90 1. President McKinley attended 
the exposition and in a noble speech, 
on the fifth of September, outlined 
the policy of friendly trade and recip- 
rocal good will which we should cul- 
tivate with the nations of the world. 
It was his last public utterance. The 
next day, as he was holding a recep- 
tion, he was shot by a miserable 
anarchist named Czolgosz, whose 
brain had been inflamed by reading 
the tirades of the ''yellow press" 

against "Czar McKinley." After a week of patient suffering the 
President died, — the third victim of the assassin's bullet since the 
Civil War. 

668. Theodore Roosevelt. The lamented McKinley was suc- 
ceeded in the presidency by a man who filled the stage of our public 
life more completely and conspicuously than any other American 
and who became probably the best-known man of the civilized world. 
Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City, October 27, 1858, 
of sturdy Dutch stock. After graduating at Harvard in the class 
of 1880 he entered the legislature of his state. He was a delegate 
to the famous Republican national convention of 1884, where he 









/Cm,*=»*^- 



FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE 
OF AN ACT OF CONGRESS 



466 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



opposed the nomination of James G. Blaine, but he did not ''bolt" 
the ticket with the Mugwumps to vote for Cleveland. The next two 
years he spent on a ranch in North Dakota, strengthening his rather 
feeble health, satisfying his longing for the free, vigorous life of the 
plains and his intense love of nature, and at the same time gaining 

that appreciation of the value of 
our great Western domain which 
so conspicuously influenced his 
public administration. He was 
appointed to the Civil Service 
Commission by President Harri- 
son in 1889, where he showed his 
devotion to clean and honest 
politics by greatly enlarging the 
"merit system" of appointment 
to office.^ We have already seen 
how he resigned his assistant 
secretaryship of the navy in 1898 
to accept the lieutenant-colonelcy 
of the Rough Riders in the 
Spanish War. Returning to New 
York with the popularity of a 
military hero he was chosen gov- 
ernor of the Empire State in the 
November election. As governor 
Mr. Roosevelt set too high a 
standard of official morality to 
please the leaders of the Repub- 
lican machine, and they craftily planned to "shelve" him by "pro- 
moting" him to the vice presidency, an office of considerable dignity, 
but of practically no influence or responsibility. Against his deter- 
mined and even tearful protest the Philadelphia convention of 1900, 
by a unanimous vote, placed his name on the presidential ticket with 

1 During Roosevelt's six years on the commission (1889-1895) the offices under the 
classified civil service were increased from 14,000 to 40,000. A great part of the voluminous 
annual reports of the commission (VI-XI) was written by Roosevelt, besides numerous 
magazine articles in support of the merit system. When he resigned his office in 1895 to 
become president of the New York police board, President Cleveland congratulated him on 
"the extent and permanence of the reform methods " he had brought about in the civil service. 




Coyrrigkt br Hfuris & Ewing 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



468 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

McKinley's. The politicians of New York considered Governor 
Roosevelt ''laid in his political grave." But his resurrection was 
speedy. Less than a year after his election to the vice presidency he 
was called on to take the oath as president of the United States 
(September 14, 1901). 

669. Roosevelt's Conception of the Presidency. On the day of 
his inauguration President Roosevelt announced his intention of 
carrying out the policies of his predecessor, and gave an earnest 
of his statement by requesting the cabinet officers to retain their 
portfolios. But the seasoned old politicians at Washington and the 
shrewd bankers in Wall Street were apprehensive lest "this young 
man" of forty-two, with his self-assurance, his independence, his 
dauntless courage, and his unquenchable idealism, should disturb 
the well-oiled machinery of the ''business man's government" and 
play havoc with the stock market. They soon discovered that they 
had in Roosevelt a president who, like Grover Cleveland, interpreted 
his oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the 
United States" to mean not waiting docilely in the White House 
for bills to come from the Capitol, but initiating, directing, and 
restraining the legislation of Congress, in the name and interest of 
the great American people, whose representative he was. 

670. Roosevelt's First Annual Message. In his first message to 
Congress, December 3, 1901, — a very long and very able state paper, 
— Roosevelt demanded more than a dozen important "reform" 
measures and sounded the keynote of his entire administration. 
He recommended that the federal government assume power of 
supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate 
business ; that a new Department of Commerce be created, with a 
Secretary in the president's cabinet ; that the Interstate Commerce 
Act be amended so as to prevent shippers from receiving special 
rates from the railroads ; that the Cuban tariff be lowered ; that the 
president be given power to transfer public lands to the Department 
of Agriculture, to be held as forest reserves ; that the navy be 
strengthened by several new battleships and heavy-armored cruisers ; 
that the civil service be extended to all offices in the District of 
Columbia ; and that the federal government inaugurate, at the public 
expense, a huge system of reservoirs and canals for the irrigation of 
our arid lands in the West. Besides making these specific recom- 
mendations, President Roosevelt discussed "anarchy," the trusts, 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 469 

the labor question, immigration, the tariff, our merchant marine, the 
Monroe Doctrine, civil-service reform, and our duty toward our 
new possessions. 

671. Roosevelt^s Popularity. The energetic President traveled 
through the various states, emphasizing his policies in many public 
speeches and winning immense popularity in every section of the 
country. He spoke in plain, vigorous language on all subjects in 
which he himself, as a virile, courageous, democratic American citizen, 
was interested, from the government of our foreign colonies and the 
control of our domestic industries to the choice of an occupation 
and the training of a family. He popularized the expressions, ''the 
criminal rich," " the square deal," " clean as a hound's tooth," and 
made the rare adjective "strenuous" one of the commonest in our 
vocabulary. He showed little regard for precedent or the staid 
decorum of official propriety when it was a question of performing 
what he regarded as a fair or useful act. In spite of the hostile 
criticism of almost the entire South, he appointed an efficient colored 
man collector of the port of Charleston. When a severe strike in the 
anthracite mines of Pennsylvania brought on a coal famine in the 
summer of 1902, and threatened to cause untold suffering during 
the following winter, the President called together representatives of 
the miners and of the owners of the coal fields, in a conference at the 
White House, and prevailed upon them to submit their dispute to 
the arbitration of a commission which he appointed. There is no 
phrase in the Constitution of the United States, in the definition of 
the president's powers and duties, that could be interpreted as giving 
him the right to intervene in a dispute between capital and labor. 
But he did intervene for the relief of millions of his anxious fellow 
countrymen ; and no public act ever brought him a greater or more 
deserved reward of praise. 

672. His Attitude toward the Great Corporations. Recognizing 
that great combinations of capital were inevitable, and that the cor- 
poration, or trust, was a necessary instrument of modern industry, 
he repeatedly declared that no honest business had anything to fear 
from his administration. At the same time he insisted that those 
corporations which practically monopolized such necessities of life 
as coal, oil, beef, and sugar, or, like the railroads, had received in- 
valuable public franchises in return for services to be rendered to 
the public, should not be allowed to reap fabulous profits by charging 



470 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



exorbitant prices or by securing illegal privileges through the bribery 
of legislatures, but should be subject to proper regulation by the 
government. Therefore he directed his attorney-general to com- 
mence over forty suits against railroads or industrial corporations 
during his administration. The government won only a few of these 
actions, but the indirect effect of what was popularly called '' busting 














MiiiW 



THE ROOSEVELT DAM, ARIZONA 
A monument of the conservation policy 



the trusts " was highly beneficial. It aroused public sentiment on the 
most important economic problem confronting our nation. 

673. His Attitude toward Labor. Toward labor President Roose- 
velt was sympathetic. He had great respect for the men who go 
down into the mines or drive the locomotive across the plains of 
the West. He believed in the right of labor to organize in unions 
for the sake of preserving the quality of its output and of making 
its demands on the employer more effective by collective bargaining. 
He recognized the justice of the strike when no other form of action 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 471 

was able to secure a " square deal " for the worker. He declared that 
the injunction without notice was an unjust restraint against or- 
ganized labor.^ But violence or wanton destruction of property or 
interference with the liberty of any man to work where and when 
he chose, he condemned as a violation of the law ; and lawlessness 
he considered just as intolerable in the strikers who burned freight 
cars as in the directors who doctored freight rates. 

674. His Conservation Policy. In his first message to Congress 
President Roosevelt spoke with the eloquence of a true lover of 
nature of the need of preserving our forest domain. It was, in his 
opinion, 'Uhe most vital internal question of the United States." 
We have seen (p. 398) how lavishly our government disposed of its 
unoccupied lands in the days when they were believed to be inex- 
haustible. Andrew Johnson soberly calculated that it would take six 
hundred years for our great West to "fill in"; but twenty-two years 
after he left the presidential chair the menace of the exhaustion of 
our forest domains from reckless and wasteful cutting was so great 
that Congress authorized the president, at his discretion, to with- 
draw timberlands from entry for public sale (1891). Roosevelt got 
Congress to extend the same authorization to mineral lands, and 
withdrew from sale over 100,000 acres of coal fields in Alaska. Alto- 
gether Roosevelt's proclamation brought the area of our reserved 
forest and mineral lands up to more than 150,000,000 acres, — a 
tract larger than France and the Netherlands combined. Had our 
government adopted this wise policy a generation earlier, it would 
have been able in Roosevelt's day to draw from its sales of timber 
and water power, its leases of coal and oil lands, a revenue sufficient 
to run the federal government without the imposition of a tariff, 
which hampered foreign trade, taxed the laboring man on almost 
every necessity of life, and by its protective clauses enriched the 
corporations which had seized on the natural resources of our opulent 
country'.- President Roosevelt put the crowning stone on his splendid 

1 See note, p. 442. 

- The iron deposits of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota alone, which furnish 88 per 
cent of the ore of the country, are estimated by the United States Steel Corporation, whose 
property they are, to be worth over $1,000,000,000. By the census of 1900, of the 800,000,000 
cultivable acres of the United States 200,000,000 were owned by 47,000 people, — the popu- 
lation of a fourth-rate Eastern city. The mineral output of the countrj- is worth over 
$2,000,000,000 a year. A government royalty of 15 per cent on this sum would yield a 
revenue equal to that collected from our tariff. 



472 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



work for the conservation of our natural resources when he invited 
the governors of all the states to a conference at the White House, 
in May, 1908, to outline a uniform policy of preservation. 

675. The Irrigation of the Arid West. For his irrigation policy 
the President secured, in June, 1902, the passage of a Reclamation 
Act, by which the proceeds from the sale of public lands in sixteen 
mining and grazing states and territories of the West (the so-called 
"cowboy states") should go into a special irrigation fund instead 
of into the public treasury. The irrigated lands were to be sold to 



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THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA 



settlers at moderate prices, on a ten-year installment plan, the pro- 
ceeds going constantly to renew the fund. Under the beneficial 
operation of this law large tracts of land, formerly worth only a cent 
or two an acre for cattle grazing, have already become worth several 
hundred dollars an acre for agriculture ; and one may see in the 
Eastern markets apples, four or five inches in diameter, grown on 
Arizona farms which, twenty years ago, were sandy wastes covered 
with coarse, scrubby grass or "sagebrush." It is not unlikely that 
future generations, looking back on Theodore Roosevelt's work, will 
rank his part in the conservation and redemption of our Western 
lands as his greatest service to the American Republic. 

676. The Panama Canal. Under the Roosevelt administration 
work was begun on the greatest piece of engineering ever undertaken 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



473 



in America, — the Panama Canal. 
Since the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty 
of 1850, the piercing of the Istlimus 
of Panama had been contemplated ; 
and after a French company, or- 
ganized by the successful builder of 
the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Les- 
seps, had begun work at Panama 
(1881), various American com- 
panies began to make estimates for 
a route across Nicaragua. The 
Spanish War, with its serious lesson 
of the 14,000-mile voyage that had 
to be taken by the Oregon to get 
from one side of our country to the 
other, and with the new responsibil- 
ities which it brought by the ac- 
quisition of colonies in the Pacific 
Ocean and the West Indies, showed 
the immediate necessity for a canal. 
Secretary Hay, in December, 1901, 
by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty 
secured from the friendly British 
government the abrogation of the 
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, thereby 
allowing the United States to build 
and control an Isthmian canal 
alone. At the same time a com- 
mission which had been appointed 
to investigate the relative advan- 
tages of routes through Nicaragua 
and Panama reported in favor of 
the former. The French Panama 
Company, however, had failed as a 

result of scandalous mismanagement and thieving and was anxious 
to sell its rights and apparatus at Panama to the United States. 
After a warm fight over the two routes Congress voted, in June, 
1902, that the canal should go through Panama if the President could 




ROUTE OF THE PANAMA CANAL 



474 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



secure the route 'Vithin a reasonable time" ; if he failed to do so, 
the canal should go through Nicaragua. 

677. The Revolution in Panama. President Roosevelt had no 
difficulty in buying out the French Panama Company for $40,000,000. 
But when he tried to negotiate with Colombia (of which Panama • 
was a province) for the right to build the canal, offering Colombia 
$10,000,000 down and a rental of $250,000 a year for the control 
of a strip of land six miles wide across the Isthmus (the Hay-Herran 




A STEAM SHOVEL AT WORK ON THE CANAL 



Treaty), the Colombian Senate rejected the treaty (August 12, 
1903). Both the United States and the province of Panama were 
exasperated by this attempt of Colombia to hold back the world's 
progress by barring the route across the Isthmus. Some rather high- 
handed diplomacy was conducted at Washington by secret agents 
from Panama, and when the Colombian Senate adjourned at the end 
of October without having reconsidered its refusal, United States 
gunboats were already hovering about the Isthmus with orders to 
let no armed force land on its soil. On the evening of November 3 
a "quiet uprising" took place in Panama, under the protection of 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



475 



our marines, and the Colombian authorities were politely shown from 
the province. Within a week the new republic of Panama had its 
accredited representative, Bunau-Varilla, in Washington, who re- 
sumed immediately the negotiations for the construction of the canal. 
The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, of November i8, 1903, with Panama 
was essentially the old Hay-Herran Treaty rejected by Colombia the 
preceding August, except that we bought a ten-mile strip outright 
from Panama.^ 

678. The Construction of the Canal. The route decided on and 
the treaty secured, the work of excavation began in May, 1904. But 
there were many difficult problems to meet at Panama, — the sanita- 
tion of the Isthmus, the importation of efficient laborers who could 
dig in the tropical climate, dissensions in the Canal Commission, the 
decision between a lock or a sea-level canal, the testing of the soil 
for the locks and the big dam at Gatun, and the question of letting 
out the work by private contract or intrusting it to government en- 
gineers. In June, 1906, Congress determined on the high-level lock 
canal, and the next spring, after securing the bids of several con- 
tractors, the President decided for government construction. The 
canal was ready for ships in the summer of 1914. The tremendous 
advantages resulting from the opening of the canal to the world's 
traffic may be judged from the following table of distances : ^ 



From 


To 


Distance via Cape 
Horn or Suez 


Distance via Panama 
Canal 


Miles Saved 


New York 


San Francisco 


13,000 


5.300 


7.700 


New York 


Yokohama 


13,000 


9,700 


3.300 


New York 


Panama 


10,800 


2,000 


8,800 


New York 


Manila 


13,000 


9,000 


4,000 


Havana 


San Francisco 


1 1 ,000 


5,000 


6,000 


San Francisco 


London 


16,000 


9,000 


7,000 



1 The encouragement of the secession of Panama from Colombia has been called an 
"ineffaceable blot of dishonor" on the Roosevelt administration. The government at 
Washington was, of course, aware of the impending revolution in Panama, but Roosevelt 
consistently maintained to the end of his life that he had done nothing to foment the revo- 
lution and that the action of our marines in Panama was no more than the fulfillment of our 
pledge by the treaty of 1846 with Colombia to maintain the " free transit " across the Isthmus. 

2 The Suez Canal, which was completed in 1869, was entirely paid for by the fees of 
vessels passing through in the first seven years. In 1904 over 4000 vessels paid fees of 
$20,000,000. The shares which the British government bought in 1875 for $20,000,000 are 
now worth over $150,000,000. The Panama Canal was very expensive, costing about $375,- 

*ooo,ooo, but the tolls will probably pay for it in less time than it took to build it. 



476 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

679. Our Relations with South America. The influence upon 
the repubhcs of Central and South America of our presence at 
Panama and in the West Indies will be increasingly felt. Till very 
recent years our attitude toward those republics has been generally 
that of cold and distant friendship. Because we have been essen- 
tially a food-producing country like Brazil and Argentina and Chile, 
we have let England, France, and Germany have their trade.^ Of 
the $500,000,000 worth of goods that the South American republics 
imported in 1900, the United States, their nearest and richest neigh- 
bor, sold them but $41,000,000 worth. But now that we have become 
a great manufacturing country we need the growing markets of these 
southern republics for our agricultural implements, our electrical 
machinery, our steel rails and locomotives, our cotton, woolen, and 
leather goods. We have revived Blaine's fertile idea of the Pan- 
American congresses,^ and a Bureau of American Republics has 
been organized at Washington to facilitate our cordial relations with 
the other American republics. 

680. Roosevelt's Extension of the Monroe Doctrine. Coinci- 
dent with this revival of interest in the Latin republics of America 
came a very significant extension of the Monroe Doctrine by Presi- 
dent Roosevelt, when, in order to satisfy the European creditors of 
Santo Domingo, he appointed a receiver to manage its bankrupt 
treasury. Heretofore we had only forbidden Europe to step into 
the republics of the New World ; now, at the request of Europe, we 
stepped in ourselves. If this principle is followed out, it may mean a 
virtual protectorate of the United States over all the weaker republics 
of the South, — a move which many "expansionists" have long re- 
garded as the logical and desirable outcome of the Monroe Doctrine. 

681. The Election of 1904. President Roosevelt's independence 
of sanctioned forms, his attack on the evils of the corporations, his 

1 Elihu Root, when Secretary of State, returning from a Pan-American Congress at Rio 
Janeiro in the autumn of 1906, reported that the previous year there were seen in the harbor 
of that great Brazilian seaport 17S5 ships flying the flag of Great Britain, 657 with the German 
flag, 349 with the French, 142 with the Norwegian, and seven sailing vessels (two of which 
were in distress) flying the Stars and Stripes. 

2 Such conferences were held in Mexico in 1901, in Rio Janeiro in 1906, and in Buenos 
Aires in 1910. Of this last congress Professor Shepherd of Columbia, its secretary, said : 
" The Conference will attempt to standardize certain customs and sanitary regulations, and 
to agree on uniform patent, trade-mark, and copyright laws. It will do all it can to cement 
friendly relations, and perhaps arrange for exchanges of professorships and scholarships 
similar to the Roosevelt exchange professorship with Germany " 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 477 

insistence on larger powers for the regulation of the railroads by the 
Interstate Commerce Commission, roused a good deal of opposition 
in Congress, and especially in the Senate. The Senate had been 
"scolded" by Roosevelt for not ratifying some reciprocity tariff 
treaties which he had negotiated in accord with the policy of 
McKinley, and as the presidential year of 1904 approached, a move- 
ment was started to supplant him by Senator Hanna. But with 
the death of Hanna in February, 1904, the opposition collapsed, and 
Roosevelt was unanimously nominated for what was practically a 
second term. The Democratic convention at St. Louis came again 
into the hands of the conservatives, who had been beaten at Chicago 
eight years before. It nominated Alton B. Parker, chief judge of 
the New York Court of Appeals, who immediately made it clear by 
a telegram to St. Louis that he was inalterably pledged to the gold 
standard. His views were accepted by the convention, in spite of 
Bryan's protest. Judge Parker was a man of the highest character 
and unquestioned ability, but he proved a veritable man of straw 
against Theodore Roosevelt. The Republicans won by the largest 
majority in the popular vote (7,624,489 to 5,082,754) ever recorded 
in our history. Roosevelt carried every state north of Mason and 
Dixon's line, and even invaded the "solid South" by winning Mis- 
souri and Maryland. The electoral vote was 336 to 140. Roosevelt 
announced on the evening of his victory that he would not be a 
candidate for renomination. 

682. Measures of Roosevelt's Second Term. After the popular 
indorsement of 1904 President Roosevelt intensified rather than 
relaxed his strenuous program. He secured the passage of the Hep- 
burn Rate Bill (1906), enlarging the control of the Interstate Com- 
merce Commission over the railroads by giving it important powers 
of rate regulation, started suits against several trusts which were 
guilty of law-breaking, set on foot a thorough investigation of the 
meat-packing houses in Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City, secured 
the passage of a pure food and drugs bill through Congress 
(1906), greatly improved the consular service, pushed the work on 
the Panama Canal, urged the admission to statehood of the terri- 
tories of Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico, and waged a con- 
tinual fight for the conservation of our forests and the redemption 
of our waste plains. 



478 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



683. Roosevelt's Foreign Influence. Roosevelt's prestige was ac- 
knowledged abroad as well as at home. At his suggestion a dispute 
over the right of European nations to collect their debts by force from 
the South American republics was referred to the Hague Court.^ On 
his initiative Russia and Japan, who were engaged in a bloody war 




THE PEACE PALACE AT THE HAGUE 
Given by Andrew Carnegie 



for the possession of the ports of Manchuria and Korea, were ten- 
dered the friendly offices of the United States and brought to con- 
clude peace at Portsmouth, New Hampshire (August, 1905). In 
the summer of 1906 President Roosevelt received the Nobel prize ^ 
for his services in the cause of international peace. 

1 On the motion of the Czar of Russia all the nations in diplomatic relations with the 
Russian court were invited to attend a conference at The Hague, Holland, in 1899, for the 
purpose of discussing the reduction of armaments, the humanizing of warfare, and the settle- 
ment of international disputes by arbitration. As a result a permanent Court of Arbitration 
was established, to which many cases of international dispute were referred for settlement. 
In 1904 President Roosevelt suggested a second Hague conference, but it was postponed on 
account of the Russo-Japanese War until the summer of 1907, when it met in a splendid new 
hall built by Andrew Carnegie, an ardent apostle of universal peace. 

2 In 1896 Alfred Nobel, a Swedish scientist, left a large fortune, the income of which was 
to be devoted to prizes to be awarded annually to men who had made conspicuous contribu- 
tions to science, letters, and the cause of international peace. Roosevelt devoted his prize 
of $40,000 to establishing a commission to work for industrial peace in our country. 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



479 



684. Taft Elected in 1908. Roosevelt had declared immediately 
after his election in 1904 that he would not be a candidate for re- 
election, , His recommendation of his Secretary of War, William H, 
Taft, as his successor was equivalent to a nomination — as Jackson's 
recommendation of Van Buren had been, seventy years before. 
Taft was nominated on the first ballot in the Republican convention 
at Chicago, June 18, 1908, and easily defeated his opponent, Bryan, 
by 321 electoral votes to 162, in 

a campaign devoid of any special 
interest. The old issues of silver 
and imperialism, on which Bryan 
had run in 1896 and 1900, were 
dead. Both parties in 1908 
pledged themselves to tariff re- 
vision, and Roosevelt had given 
his administration so democratic 
a character by his prosecution of 
the trusts that he had stolen most 
of Bryan's thunder. The Repub- 
licans maintained their invasion 
of the ''solid South" by again 
carrying the* state of Missouri, to- 
gether with all the Northern and 
Western states except Nebraska, 
Colorado, and Nevada. 

685. Ex-President Roosevelt, 
term of office. Colonel Roosevelt 
hunting trip to procure specimens of rare game for the Smithsonian 
Institution at Washington. When he " emerged from the jungle," 
in the spring of 19 10, he at once became the center of observation 
of the whole Western world. His trip from Egypt through Italy, 
Austria, France, Germany, Holland, and England was a continuous 
ovation, such as no private citizen had ever received. Emperors, 
kings, princes, presidents, and ministers all received him with the 
highest marks of honor. He delivered addresses at the University 
of Cairo, at the Sorbonne, at the University of Berlin, and at Oxford 
University. He represented the United States at the funeral of King 
Edward VII in London. When he landed at New York, on June 18, 




WILLIAM H. TAFT 



Immediately after the close of his 
went to East Africa on a long 



48o THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

19 10, he was welcomed with an enthusiastic demonstration. In reply 
to the Mayor's greetings, before an enormous crowd at the Battery, 
he said : '' I am glad to be back among the people I love. And I am 
ready and eager to do my part, so far as I am able, in helping solve 
problems which must be solved if we of this, the greatest democratic 
republic on which the sun has ever shone, are to see its destinies rise 
to the high level of our hopes and its opportunities." 



The Return of the Democrats 

686. "Big Business." Roosevelt's words were not empty rheto- 
ric. The country to which he returned in the summer of 19 10 was 
in the midst of a political agitation such as it had not known since 
the free-silver campaign of 1896. The Republican party, which he 
had led to triumphant victory in 1904, was split into warring fac- 
tions. On the one side were a group of reformers who were demanding 
that the will of the people should find more complete expression in 
the government. On the other side were the conservatives (''stand- 
patters") who insisted that prosperity and order should not be 
endangered by rash experiments in politics. The cause of the con- 
troversy lay chiefly in the development of ''big business" since the 
Spanish War. Railroad magnates, like E. H. Harriman, W. H. Van- 
derbilt, and J. J. Hill, had added thousands of miles of track to their 
" systems," until they controlled the transportation of areas compris- 
ing a quarter or even a third of the United States. Copper, sugar, 
oil, lumber, whisky, cordage, rubber, coal, and steel were monopolized 
by huge trusts which regulated output, dictated prices, fixed condi- 
tions of labor, and influenced legislation. 

687. Remedies Proposed. For some years before the election 
of Taft there was a growing conviction in the country that big busi- 
ness had a sinister influence on the government, which could be 
remedied only by a larger participation of the public in practical 
politics. A group of men in Congress, especially senators from the , 
Middle West (Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, La Follette of Wis-i 
consin, Clapp of Minnesota, Bristow of Kansas, Beveridge of In- 1 
diana) led the movement. Roosevelt himself, though not opposed 
to the trusts as such, had, by his insistence that rich and poor alike 
should obey the law and by his prosecution of the "bad" trusts, 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 481 

given aid and comfort to the reform movement ; while his frequent 
moral exhortations in messages, speeches, and articles had encour- 
aged a higher tone of business and political ethics. A number of 
popular magazines, like C oilier^ s, the Outlook, the American, 
McClure's, Everybody's, and the Cosmopolitan, took up the task of 
exposing crookedness in big business and wickedness in high places — 
" muck-raking," as it was called. The program of the reformers con- 
tained many innovations in politics, such as the nomination of officials 
by the people in direct primaries, the initiative, and referendum, and 
recall,^ the stringent regulation of business by the government, and 
the popular election of senators and judges. 

688. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff. President Taft had been in 
office but a few weeks when the conflict between the reformers and 
the stand-patters broke out. According to the preelection pledge of 
his party, Taft called Congress in extra session (March 15, 1909) 
for the purpose of " revising the tariff downward." The bill brought 
in by the Committee of Ways and Means (Sereno E. Payne, of New 
York, chairman) and passed by the Plouse contained substantial 
reductions. But the Senate, under the lead of Nelson W. Aldrich, 
of Rhode Island, restored the protective features, so that the Payne- 
Aldrich Bill, as finally passed in August and signed by the President, 
differed but slightly from the existing Dingley tariff of 1897. Seven 
Republican senators and twenty members of the House voted against 
it. These " insurgents " joined with the Democrats in denouncing the 
Republican party for its broken pledge. When President Taft, in 
a speech in Minnesota, praised the Payne-Aldrich tariff as the best 
in our history, he was charged with putting himself squarely on the 
side of the stand-patters. Taft's sturdy support of his Secretary of 
the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger, who was accused of unduly 
favoring the big business interests in his management of the timber- 
lands of the Northwest, still further discredited him in the eyes of 
the insurgents. 

689. President Taft. Taft was not a reactionary. Many of his 
measures showed a genuine sympathy with progressive ideas. He 

1 By the "initiative" is meant the right of the people to initiate legislation. On the 
petition of a certain small percentage of the voters of the state, a proposed law must be 
printed on the ballot of the next election to be voted on by the people. The " referendum " 
provides that laws passed by the legislature must, upon petition of a percentage of the voters 
of the state, be " referred " to the people for indorsement or rejection. The " recall " is the 
power af dismissing an ofEcial or a legislator before his term of oflRce cjrp'res 



482 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

added over 10,000 positions to the classified list of the Civil Service, 
as against 9000 added by McKinley. He favored the extension of 
the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission in his rail- 
road bill of 19 10. He instructed his Attornej^-General, George W. 
Wickersham, to bring 45 suits against the trusts, where Roosevelt's 
attorneys had brought 25. He encouraged his Secretary of State, I 
Philander C. Knox, to negotiate treaties of arbitration and reci- 
procity.^ But in spite of this record, he failed to win confidence 
and popularity. His ability, his ample equipment, his high char- 
acter, were acknowledged, but the qualities of leadership were lacking. | 
After seven and a half years of Theodore Roosevelt he seemed tame 
and uninspired. His long years on the bench had bred in him a | 
judicial attitude of mind, which made it impossible for him to ride ) 
at the head of a movement like a dashing knight. He was conserv- 
ative by nature, and his rejection by the radicals made him seem 
more closely allied to the reactionaries than he really was. He 
wanted the country to walk toward reform with something of his own 
dignified and measured pace, while the insurgents were spurring 
it to a gallop. 

690. The Election of 1910. Not being able to hurry President 
Taft, the insurgents ignored him and concentrated their attack on 
the machine to which they claimed he had become a slave. In the 
spring of 19 10 they combined with the Democrats to depose the 
stand-pat Speaker of the House, Joseph G. Cannon, from his chair- 
manship of the powerful Committee on Rules, which controlled the, 
whole procedure of legislation. They doubled the size of the com- 
mittee and provided for its election by ballot. The following Novem- 
ber the country pronounced against the administration by electing 
Democratic governors in a number of Republican states (Massa- 
chusetts, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey) and turning 
a Republican majority of 47 in the House to a Democratic majority 
of 54. It was the first time since 1892 that the Democrats had got 
control of either branch of Congress. Their opposition made impos- 
sible any effective legislation during the second half of President 
Taft's term. 

1 Chief among' these measures were a reciprocity treaty with Canada which the Canadians 
rejected by turning out their government in September, 1911 ; and an arbitration treaty with 
England which our Senate amended out of existence. 



I 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 483 



691. Senator La Follette. On January 21, 191 1, the insurgent 
senators and representatives met at La Follette's house in Washington 
to lay plans for capturing the Republican party in the presidential 
campaign of the next year. They formed the National Progressive 
Republican League for the "promotion of popular government." A 
few months later they selected La Follette as their leader, and in a 
conference held at Chicago, in October, they recommended the Wis- 
consin senator to the country as " the logical candidate for the presi- 
dency" in 191 2. La Follette, before his entrance into the Senate 
in 1906, had been governor of Wisconsin for three terms. His public 
life had been one of persistent championship of radical measures in 
economics and politics. He had fought the railroads in Wisconsin, 
eliminating their agents from the control of the legislature and 
reducing their fares to two cents a mile. He had secured the adop- 
tion of the direct primary, a graduated income tax, and important 
labor laws, and during his administration kept the record of the 
Wisconsin congressmen at Washington before the people of the state. 

692. Roosevelt supplants La Follette as Progressive Leader. 
The laurels of Roosevelt, however, troubled the ambitions of 

' La Follette. The ex-President did not join the Progressive League, 
though he had preached its doctrines months before its formation, 
in a famous speech on "The New Nationalism," at Ossawatomie, 
Kansas (August 31, 1910). In spite of Roosevelt's declaration in 
1904 that he would "under no circumstances" be a candidate for 
a third term, the Progressive forces in the East turned to him more 
and more, fearing La Follette's excessive radicalism and doubting his 
ability to fill the presidential office. La Follette assailed Roosevelt 
bitterly, contending that his record had been no whit better than 
Taft's on the trusts or the tariff and ridiculing his " rhetorical radi- 
calism " and " mock heroics " now as the device of insatiable ambition 
to return to office. In spite of his protests and denunciations, how- 
ever. La Follette saw his support steadily going to Roosevelt. When 
seven Progressive governors joined, early in 19 12, in an appeal to 

I the ex-President to accept the leadership of the movement, Roosevelt 
yielded. On February 24, 1912, he entered the presidential race 
with the declaration that his "hat was in the ring," 

L 693. Formation of the Progressive Party. When the Republi- 
can convention was opened at Chicago, June 18, 19 12, a battle royal 



484 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

ensued between the Progressives and the administration. Roosevelt 
had the overwhelming support of the delegates who had been chosen 
by popular vote in the dozen states which had direct primaries — 
showing that he was the people's choice in so far as that choice could 
express itself. But Taft had control of the administration machinery 
and through the support of officeholders secured the delegations from 
the Southern states, which were fully represented in the convention 
though they did not contribute electoral votes to the Republican 
ticket. When the seats of nearly 250 of the Taft delegates were 
contested, the convention (including the challenged delegates them- 
selves) voted the Roosevelt claimants down. The administration 
forces elected their chairman by the close vote of 558 to 502. There- 
upon Roosevelt bolted the convention, hurling against it the defiant 
manifesto that "any man nominated by the convention as now 
constituted would be merely the beneficiary of a successful fraud," 
and would have ''no claim to the support of Republican voters." 
By Roosevelt's advice the Progressive delegates returned to their 
states, organized a new party, and reconvened in a national con- 
vention at Chicago, August 5. Two thousand enthusiastic delegates 
came. The platform adopted included the radical political program 
of the insurgents with pledges of social and industrial reforms. With 
the religious fervor of crusaders, interrupting their cheers with 
stanzas of ''Onward, Christian Soldiers," the delegates of the new 
Progressive party unanimously nominated Theodore Roosevelt for 
president and Governor Hiram Johnson of California for vice 
president. 

694. The Election of Woodrow Wilson. Meanwhile the Demo- 
cratic convention had met at Baltimore (June 25), and after an 
exciting week's contest between Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri 
and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, had nominated the 
latter (chiefly through the influence of William J. Bryan). Wilson 
conducted his campaign in a dignified manner, commending pro- 
gressive ideas in admirable speeches of somewhat cautious en- 
thusiasm ; while Roosevelt and Taft, lately bosom friends, exhibited 
the unedifying spectacle of a campaign of mutual abuse. The election 
in November resulted in a decisive victory for Wilson, though his 
popular vote was 2,000,000 less than the combined vote for his 
opponents. The Democrats got control of both Houses of Congress 




Copyriiiht by Harris & Ewing 



WOODROW WILSON 



} 



I 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



485 



(Senate 51 to 45, House 291 to 144), an advantage which they had 
held in only one session (1893-1895) since the presidency of James 



Buchanan. 



The figures of the election are as follows 



Candidate 


Party 


Popular Vote 


Electoral 


States carried • 


Wilson 
Roosevelt 
Taft 
Debs 


Dem. 
Prog. 
Rep. 
Soc. 


6,298,857 

4.124,597 

3,484,960 

901,725 


435 

88 

8 


All except 

CaI.,Mich.,Minn.,Pa.,S. Dak. Wash., 

Utah., Vermont 



695. Wilson's Inaugural Address. On the fourth of March, 
19 13, Woodrow Wilson delivered his brief inaugural address as 
twenty-seventh president of the United States to an immense and 
enthusiastic throng gathered before the east front of the Capitol at 
Washington. He spoke of the abundant forces, material and moral, 
in American life, of the evil that had come in with the good, the 
inexcusable waste amid the unparalleled riches. He characterized 
the task of the new day as the elevation of all that concerns our 
national life to the high plane of the enlightened individual conscience. 
He abjured all spirit of partisanship, and in words recalling Abraham 
Lincoln's immortal speech at Gettysburg he declared, '^This is not 
a day of triumph ; it is a day of dedication." He summoned ^' all 
patriotic forward-looking men" to his side, and promised not to fail 
them if they would but counsel and sustain him. The address was 
distinguished for its spirit of reasonableness joined with lofty idealism, 
of firm conviction without a trace of partisanship, all expressed in 
language well-nigh faultless. 

696. The New President. Practical politicians had some mis- 
givings as to how this "scholar in politics," this "theorist" and 
"schoolmaster," would manage men at the Capitol.^ Cartoonists 
pictured him in cap and gown shaking his ruler at Congress, He had 
broken up the machine in New Jersey, to be sure, but he would find 
Washington a far different place from Trenton. Little by little, how- 
ever, the "scholar," with a quiet confidence and unruffled tenacity, 
established his power over cabinet, Senate, House, and lobby, and 

1 For many years before his election as governor of New Jersey (in 1910) Wilson had 
been connected with Princeton University as professor of politics and, since 1902, as president. 
He is the author of several books on American politics and history. 



486 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

before six months were past made himself the most complete master 
of Congress since the days of Thomas Jefferson. Foreign observers 
anticipated a '^ fair and just order of things under his wise, gifted 
leadership." "He is a man of fresh, virile, original mind," wrote 
the London Chronicle, " who should leave his name and work deeply- 
impressed in history." 

697. The Cabinet. The chief place in the cabinet was given to 
William J. Bryan, whose influence in the Baltimore convention had 
secured Wilson's nomination. Lindley M, Garrison of New Jersey 
was made Secretary of War, and Franklin K. Lane of California, 
Secretary of the Interior, both exceptionally strong men. William 
G. McAdoo, soon to become the President's son-in-law, was made 
Secretary of the Treasury. William B. Wilson, closely affiliated with 
the labor unions, was Secretary of Labor. James C. McReynolds 
(Attorney- General), Josephus Daniels (Navy), Albert S. Burleson 
(Postmaster-General), D. F. Houston (Agriculture), and William C. 
Redfield (Commerce) completed the cabinet.^ 

698. "The New Freedom." Wilson, like Jackson, Lincoln, Cleve- 
land, and Roosevelt, considered the presidency a great popular trust 
and conceived his duty to be the leadership of the American democ- 
racy. At the moment of his assumption of office he published his 
program in a volume entitled '^ The New Freedom," made up of the 
most constructive passages of his campaign speeches. It was a kind 
of expanded inaugural address to the whole American people, advo- 
cating the return to free competition in industry and full publicity 
for public affairs. "I take my stand absolutely, where every pro- 
gressive ought to take his stand," he said, "on the proposition that 
private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable." "You are willing 
to act jot the people, but you are not willing to act through the 
people," was his challenge to the leaders of the invisible government 
of special privilege; "now we propose to act for ourselves." It was 
an economic Declaration of Independence. 

1 Bryan resigned the Secretaryship of State in the midsummer of 1915 because he thought 
Wilson's tone to Germany in the second Lusitania note (p. 499) too belligerent. He was 
succeeded by Robert Lansing of New York. Garrison resigned the war portfolio in Febru- 
ary, 1916, for the opposite reason : he wanted a strong national army in place of the militia 
system. He was replaced by Newton D. Baker of Ohio. James C. McReynolds of Tennessee, 
the Attorney-General, was promoted to the Supreme Bench in August, 1914, and his place 
taken by Thomas W. Gregory of Texas. The other cabinet officers remained unchanged 
through Wilson's first administration. 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 487 

699. The Underwood Tariff Bill. On April 7 President Wilson 
called Congress together in extra session for the revision of the 
tariff. Believing that the relations between the executive and the 
legislative should be close and harmonious, Wilson revived the cus- 
tom, in abeyance since the days of John Adams, of appearing in 
person to read his '' messages " to Congress. In this first brief address 
of April 8, 19 13, he spoke of the revision of the tariff alone. He 
declared that we must abolish everything that had "even the sem- 
blance of privilege or artificial advantage" and make our business 
men and producers "better workers and masters than any in the 
world " by constantly sharpening American wits in competition with 
the wits of the rest of the world. The tariff bill, bearing the name 
of Oscar Underwood of Alabama, Chairman of the Ways and Means 
Committee, passed the House, May 8, by a vote of 281 to 139, and 
the Senate, in the following September, by a vote of 44 to 37, the 
Louisiana senators standing out against it for its provision for free 
sugar after three years. Wilson signed the bill with great satisfaction, 
declaring that "a fight for the people and for free business, which 
had lasted a long generation through, had at last been won hand- 
somely and completely." The Underwood Bill reduced the average of 
duties to 26 per cent, from 39.4 per cent under the Wilson-Gorman 
Act of 1894, and 40.12 per cent under the Payne- Aldrich Act of 
1909. Luxuries like diamonds, furs, ivory, silks, perfumes, wines,' 
tobacco, automobiles, were either put on the taxed list or left there 
unchanged ; but a great number of necessaries and comforts, includ- 
ing food, farm implements, wool, sugar, lumber, coal, cottons, cattle, 
eggs, were either put on the free list or greatly reduced. To make 
up for the loss in revenue from these objects, a progressive income 
tax was levied (see page 440). Net incomes above $3000 for a 
single person, or $4000 for a married couple, were subject to a tax 
of I per cent up to $20,000, 2 per cent from $20,000 to $50,000, and 
so on by degrees until the additional tax reached 6 per cent on incomes 
above $500,000. How the Underwood tariff as a whole would have 
affected business and prices in America under normal conditions it is 
impossible to say. The advent of the World War in Europe the year 
after the bill was passed created an unprecedented demand for Ameri- 
can foodstuffs and manufactures, sending our foreign trade from 
about $4,500,000,000 in 1913 up to over $10,000,000,000 in 1919. 



488 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

700. The Banking and Currency Problem. Second only to the 
tariff in the President's mind was the reform of our currency and 
banking system. Every year of the rapid development of our agri- 
culture and manufactures that followed the Spanish War revealed the 
inadequacy both of the volume and of the flexibility of our currency 
to meet the business needs of the country. Most of the business of 
the country is done on credit, and the extent to which the banks 
could furnish credit was limited by the fact that they could 
issue currency only on the basis of government bonds (see p. 359). 
Periods of prosperity and business expansion, when the demand for 
credit at the banks was greatest, were naturally just the periods in 
which the government bonds stood highest and offered the least 
attractive investment for the banks. The difficulty, under these 
conditions, of securing credit for the legitimate business enterprises 
of the country led to the charge of a "money trust" or ''credit 
trust," monopolizing the fluid capital of the country. A committee 
of the House (the Pujo Committee), appointed to investigate this 
charge, reported just at the close of the Taft administration, finding 
evidence of such a trust ; but the bankers replied by a circular, pub- 
lished by Mr. Morgan, attributing the evils to "a clumsy and out- 
grown banking system" rather than to ''the schemes of men." 

701. The Glass-Owen Bill. Various remedies were proposed for 
this "outgrown system" dating from the Civil War. The Aldrich- 
Vreeland Act was passed. May 30, 1908, creating "national currency 
associations," which were allowed to issue emergency currency in 
times of need, based on other securities than national bonds, but 
the scheme did not work smoothly or satisfactorily. In the mid- 
summer of 1 9 13 Carter Glass of Virginia introduced a Currency 
and Banking Bill into the House, on which he had been working for 
a year and in which President Wilson and Secretaries McAdoo and 
Bryan had a part. Senator Owen of Oklahoma took charge of the 
measure in the Upper House. The Glass-Owen Bill, known as the 
Federal Reserve Act, was passed by substantial majorities in both 
Houses, and signed by President Wilson, December 23, 19 13. It 
divides the United States into twelve federal districts, in each of 
which is a central city with a federal reserve bank. Every national 
bank of the district is obliged to enter the federal reserve system, 
subscribing 6 per cent of its capital and surplus to form the capital of 



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490 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

the Federal Reserve Bank. These subscribing banks are called 
" member banks." The management of the Federal Reserve Banks is 
vested in a central committee, called the Federal Reserve Board, 
consisting of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Comptroller of the 
Currency, and five other members appointed by the President.^ 
The powers of the board are ample, including the inspection of the 
Federal Reserve Banks, the determination of what kinds of "paper" 
the member banks may discount, the transfer of funds from one 
district to another, the establishment of branches in foreign countries, 
and the fixing of rates of interest on loans. The system has proved 
a complete success. 

702. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act. The extra session of Con- 
gress called by Wilson in April, 19 13, lasted through the summer 
and autumn and merged into the regular session of December, before 
the Glass-Owen Bill was signed ; still the President kept Congress 
at work like a "schoolmaster" for another eight months without 
interruption. In the continuous session of 567 days, whose reported 
debates fill 18,000 pages of the Congressional Record, many im- 
portant bills were put through besides the major acts of the tariff 
and the currency. The Clayton Anti-Trust Bill, signed in October, 
19 1 4, consolidated a number of amendments and additions to the 
industrial legislation which had been put on the statute books since 
the passage of the original Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. It 
prohibited "interlocking directorates" (that is, the appearance of 
the same men on several boards of directors) for banks and trust 
companies whose deposits, capital, surplus, and profits amounted to 
$5,000,000, forbade price discriminations in favor of dealers who 
agreed not to use the goods of a rival company, and forbade the use 
of injunctions in labor disputes over questions of the terms of em- 
ployment, " unless necessary to prevent irreparable injury to property 
rights for which there was no remedy at law." The radicals called the 
Clayton Act "a dough-bullet bill," because it failed to give the 
Interstate Commerce Commission the right to regulate the issues 
of stocks and bonds by corporations doing an interstate business; 

1 The board, with Charles S. Hamlin of Massachusetts as president, took oflfice August lo, 
1914, and the reserve banks were opened November i6. The World War had broken out 
early in August, so that the new system came just in time to help steady the finances of the 
country, which were much disturbed by the war. 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 491 

while the conservatives called it '^a muddle and a sham" whose 
only effect would be to disturb the business of the country, 

703. Other Measures of the 63d Congress. Other important 
measures of the 63d Congress, which President Wilson in a speech 
at Indianapolis, January 8, 1915, called "the most remarkable Con- 
gress since the Civil War," were the creation of a Federal Trade 
Commission to investigate the conduct of " big business " and advise 
the Departments of Commerce and the Interior in its regulation ; the 
Smith-Lever Act, granting federal aid to establish farm bureaus ; 
an Industrial Employers' Arbitration x'\ct ; a Ship Registry Act, 
for the transfer of foreign ships to the American flag; an Alaskan 
Railway Act ; a Philippine Act, replacing the appointive Commission 
by a Senate elected by the Filipinos ; and the repeal of the Panama 
Canal Tolls Act. 

704. The Repeal of the Panama Canal Tolls Act. The last- 
named act deserves some comment. In August, 19 12, the Demo- 
cratic House and the Republican Senate had concurred in passing a 
bill exempting coastwise American vessels from paying tolls through 
the Panama Canal, which was rapidly nearing completion. The 
third clause of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 with Great 
Britain (see p. 473) reads : "The canal shall be free and open to the 
vessels of commerce and of war of all nations ... on terms of entire 
equality, so that there shall be no discrimination against any such 
nation ... in respect of the conditions or charges of traffic or 
otherwise." The British government protested that the act of 
August, 1912, was a violation of this clause; while the Taft ad- 
ministration maintained that the phrase "open to all nations on 
terms of entire equality" meant to all foreign nations. The United 
States, as sole builder and owner of the canal, was bound by the 
treaty not to "discriminate against any nation," but was not bound 
to refuse a favor to her own vessels engaged in a purely domestic 
trade. We had a treaty of arbitration with Great Britain, negotiated 
under Roosevelt in 1908, which pledged us to arbitrate the dispute. 
But in the first week of March, 19 14, President Wilson came before 
Congress, and in a speech of less than three minutes' duration urged, 
almost commanded, the repeal of the act. "I ask this of you," he 
said, " in support of the foreign policy of the Administration. I shall 
not know how to deal with other matters of even greater delicacy 



492 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

and nearer consequence, if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging 
measure." Without asking what the " President's secret " was, Con- 
gress repealed the act. 

705. The Panama Canal Opened. The canal was opened for 
world traffic in August, 19 14, when the American steamer Anco7i 
went through the locks with her decks thronged with officials and 
distinguished guests of the American and Panama governments. The 
tonnage passing through the canal in the first few years was rather 
small, owing both to the World War and to the need for closing 
the canal for some months at a time in order to remove "slides." 
In 1916, 4,931,911 tons passed through, paying tolls of $3,673,233, 
while the cost of operation and repairs was almost $7,000,000. But 
by the end of 1919 the tonnage had increased to about 8,000,000 
a year. The traffic has not yet paid 2 per cent on the investment, 
but under peace conditions and with the rapid development of our 
South American trade, the canal will become a very profitable 
investment. In January, 1914, Colonel George W. Goethals, ''the 
prophet engineer" who had completed this greatest work on the 
western continent, was made the first governor of the Panama Canal 
Zone. Percy MacKaye wrote the ode in honor of the occasion : 

A man went down to Panama 

Where many a man had died, 

To slit the shding mountains 

And lift the eternal tide. 

A man stood up in Panama, 

And the mountains stood aside. ^ 

706. The Elections of 1914. The mid- term elections, which fol- 
lowed only ten days after the adjournment of the long session of the 
63d Congress, resulted, as usual, in a reaction against the Adminis- 
tration. Republican governors were chosen in New York, New 
Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other states, while the Demo- 
cratic majority in Congress was reduced to 31 in the House. The 
tariff and trust legislation offered many points for criticism. Bryan's 
conduct of the State Department was severely censured. A terrible 
strike war had been raging for nearly a year in the mining regions 
of Colorado, which neither the state militia furnished by Governor 
Ammons nor the six troops of cavalry sent by President Wilson had 
been able to quell. And, finally, the policy of the Administration in 




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ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 493 

regard to Mexico was branded by its opponents as vacillating, stupid, 
arbitrary, and cowardly all at once. 

707. The Mexican Revolution. Seldom has a president of the 
United States inherited a more difficult problem than that which 
confronted Wilson in the Mexican situation. On the last Saturday 
of February, 19 13, President Madero of Mexico was murdered and 
a week of turmoil followed, with fierce fighting in the very streets 
and squares of the Mexican capital. A ruthless, dissipated, revo- 
lutionary general, with Indian blood in his veins, fought his way to 
power — Victoriano Huerta, the reputed murderer of Madero. Al- 
though twenty-six foreign nations recognized Huerta, and our am- 
bassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, advised the Administration 
at Washington to follow suit, President Wilson refused to do so. 
He sent John Lind of Minnesota as his special agent to Mexico 
to propose terms for the settlement of the anarchy reigning there. 
The United States promised to recognize the Mexican government 
after a general and free election should be held, in which Huerta 
should not be a candidate. Huerta replied that he had the allegiance 
of twenty-two of the twenty-seven states of Mexico with an army 
of 80,000 men, and that he could easily put down the rebellion. He 
asked the United States to ignore the disturbances and to send an 
ambassador to his government. Huerta's real character came out, 
however, when on October 10, two weeks before the general elections 
in Mexico, he invaded the Assembly with an armed force, arrested 
and imprisoned a hundred deputies, and proclaimed himself dictator. 
England, France, and Germany, recognizing America's paramount 
interests in Mexico and respecting the Monroe Doctrine, urged this 
country to act in safeguarding foreign lives and property across our 
southern border. 

708. Our Intervention in Mexico. Wilson's policy of "watchful 
waiting " until Mexico should straighten out her own tangled affairs 
grew more and more difficult to maintain. An embargo on the export 
of arms to Mexico had been laid in 191 2, which Wilson raised in 
February, 19 14, in behalf of General Carranza, who was fighting 
to overthrow Huerta. The murder of an Englishman named Benton, 
about the same time, increased the pressure put on our government 
to restore order in Mexico. On April 9, 1914, a boatload of Ameri- 
can sailers from the launch Dolphin landed at Tampico to buy 



494 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

gasoline. The launch was flying the American flag, but one of 
Huerta's officers seized the entire party and carried them off to jail 
amid the hoots and jeers of the crowd. Rear Admiral Mayo de- 
manded the release of the sailors and an apology for the insult in 
the shape of a formal salute to our flag. Huerta disavowed the act 
of his officer, released the men, but refused to salute the flag. Eleven 
warships and three cruisers of the Atlantic fleet were ordered to 
Tampico. On April 20, President Wilson came before Congress, ask- 
ing permission to use force against Huerta '^ to maintain the dignity 
and authority of the United States." The vote was 337 to 37. On 
the same day our forces were ordered to occupy Vera Cruz on the 
Gulf of Mexico. Admiral Fletcher landed a detachment of marines 
and seized the customs house, while the battleships Utah and Florida 
shelled the arsenal from the harbor. Seventeen American lives were 
lost before Fletcher had control of the seaport. 

709. Carranza and Villa. To avert war between Mexico and the 
United States, the greater republics of South America now offered 
their mediation. Representatives from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile 
(the "ABC powers") met the delegates of Huerta and the United 
States at Niagara Falls, Canada, in May, and urged Huerta to 
resign. He departed from Mexico on the German cruiser Dresden 
in July, and in September President Wilson withdrew our forces 
from Vera Cru^ and returned to his policy of ''watchful waiting," 
declaring that it was none of our business how Mexico settled her 
own troubles. But anarchy continued in Mexico while Carranza 
slowly fought his way to power against the bandit Villa. Carranza 
made himself master of the capital in July, 191 5, and as his fortunes 
improved, his antagonist Villa grew more desperate. Finally, on 
March 10, 19 16, Villa's ruffians crossed our border with cries of 
" Death to Americans ! " and raided the town of Columbus, New 
Mexico, killing seven soldiers and twelve civilians, and wounding 
a score of others. We were obliged to send a punitive force into | 
Mexico (with Carranza's permission) in pursuit of Villa. But the 
clever bandit eluded our soldiers, and before long Carranza, charging 
us with designs on his power, demanded our withdrawal. The troops 
came back from their wild-goose chase over the hot plains of northern 
Mexico without Villa and with little glory. Carranza's power grew 
slowly but steadily in the distracted land, until he was able to 



ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 495 

summon a constitutional convention and get himself elected the first 
president of the Mexican Republic under the new constitution for 
a term of four years (March, 19 17). 

President Wilson asked nothing more than to be allowed to go on 
with the program of social and industrial reform which he outlined 
in his speech to Congress in December, 19 14. But the World War 
was already under way in Europe, which, in spite of our declaration 
of strict neutrality, was affecting our commerce, arousing our sym- 
pathies and protests, and absorbing our attention to the exclusion of 
all other interests. It almost monopolized the labors of our govern- 
ment during the remainder of Wilson's first term of office, and at 
the opening of his second term drew us into its angry vortex (April 6, 

1917)- 

References 

The Spanish War and the Philippines: J. H. Latane, America as a 
V/orld Power (American Nation Series), chaps, i-x; A. C. Coolidge, The United 
States as a World Power, chaps, v-viii; J. W. Foster, American Diplomacy 
in the Orient, chap, xiii; J. G. Schurman, Philippine Affairs; D. C. Worcester, 
The Philippines, Past and Present; E. E. Sparks, The Expansion of the Amer- 
ican People, chap, xxxvi; C. R. Fish, The Path of Empire (Chronicles, Vol. 
XLVI), chaps, ii-v; J. D. Long, The New American Navy, chaps, v-xii; H. T. 
Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, chaps, xii-xiv; A. B. Hart, American His- 
tory told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 180-196; The Obvious Orient, chaps, 
xxiv-xxvi; E. B. Andrews, The United States in our Own Time, chaps, xxvii, 
xxviii; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (enlarged edition of 1911), 
Vol. II, chap, xcvii; Histories of the Spanish War by H. C. Lodge, R. A. 
Alger, and Henry Watterson. 

The Roosevelt Policies: Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography; Latane, 
chaps, xii-xvi; Peck, chap, xv; Coolidge, chaps. xv-xLx; J. W. Foster, A 
Century of American Diplomacy, chap, xii; E. L. Bogart, Economic History 
of the United States, chap, xxx; H. C. Lodge (ed.). Addresses and Presidential 
Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1002-1^04; Gitford Pinchot, The Fight for 
Conservation; Francis Curtis, The Republican Party, chaps xvi-xviii; F. W. 
HoLLS, The Peace Conference at The Hague, chaps, i, ii, viii; W. F. Johnson, 
Four Centuries of the Panama Canal, chaps, viii-xii; John Mitchell, Or- 
ganized Labor, chaps, xvii, xviii; biographies of Roosevelt by J. A. Riis, Wm. 
D. Lewis, Wm. R. Thayer, Chas. G. Washburn, and Lawrence Abbott. 

The Return of the Democrats: F. A. Ogg, National Progress (American 
Nation Series), chaps, i-xvi; E. D. Durand, The Trust Problem; Ida M. 
Tarbell, The Tariff in our Times; W. H. Taft, Presidential Addresses and 
State Papers (New York, 1910) ; W. Wilson, Presidential Addresses and State 
Papers (New York, 1917), The New Freedom; R. M. LaFollette, Auto- 
biography; F. W. Taussig, The Tariff Act of 191 3 {Quarterly Journal of Eco- 
nomics, Vol. XXVIII, 1-30) ; H. P. Willis, The Federal Reserve; C. W. Barron. 



496 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

The Mexican Problem; E. R. Johnson, The Panama Canal and Commerce; H. 
Croly, The Promise of American Life and Progressive Democracy; biographies 
of Wilson by H. J. Ford, Wm. B. Hale, and H. W. Harris (an Englishman). 

Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Hague Peace Conference of 1899: Holls, pp. 1-35, 365-372; 
Latane, pp. 242-254; A. D. White, Autobiography, Vol. II, pp. 250-354; J. 
W. Foster, Arbitration and the Hague Court. 

2. Anti-Imperialism: Coolidge, pp. 148-171; Peck, pp. 610-612; Andrews, 
pp. 853-858; G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. II, pp. 304- 
329; Edward Atkinson, The Cost of War and Warfare from 1898 to 1904; 
MooRFiELD Storey, What shall we do with our Dependencies? 

3. The Convention of the Progressive Party at Chicago: E. Stanwood, 
History of the Presidency, Vol. II, pp. 288-298; Review of Reviews, Vol. 
XLVI, pp. 310 ff.; W. R. Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 350-375; W. D. 
Lewis, Life of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 370-380. 

4. Were we Unjust to Colombia? Roosevelt, The Panama Blackmail 
Treaty {Metropolitan Magazine, Vol. XLI, p. 8) ; Thayer, John Hay and 
the Panama Republic {Harper's Magazine, Vol. CXXXI, 167-175) ; Abbott, 
Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 137-141; Chamberlain, A Chapter 
of National Dishonor {North American Review, Vol. CXCV, pp. 145-174). 

5. Oregon's Experiments in Direct Democracy: J. D. Barnett, Opera- 
tion of the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall in Oregon, pp. 189-218; Dickey, 
The Presidential Primary in Oregon {Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, 
pp. 81-104) ; Haynes, People's Rule in Oregon {Political Science Quarterly, 
Vol. XXVI, pp. 32-62). 



CHAPTER XX 
AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 

Neutrality 

710. The Origin of the War. On the 28th of June, 1914, the 
heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated in the Bosnian capital 
of Serajevo by a Serbian youth named Princip. Holding the anti- 
Teutonic propaganda of Serbian revolutionary societies responsible 
for the murder, Austria, backed by her powerful ally Germany, 
started to punish Serbia by invading her territory and bombarding 
her capital. The Czar of Russia mobilized his troops on the Austrian 
border to protect his fellow Slavs in the Balkans and check the 
German "push to the east" {Drang nach Osten). France was Rus- 
sia's ally, and Great Britain was on the friendliest terms {Entente) 
with France. When, therefore, Germany ordered Russia to de- 
mobilize within twelve hours, it looked as though all the great powers 
of Europe would be drawn into the Austro-Serbian quarrel over the 
assassination of a prince. In vain did the foreign ministers in the 
great capitals of Europe labor to avert the terrible catastrophe of a 
general war, in the last week of July, 19 14. In vain did they plead 
for time, for the submission of the dispute to the Hague Tribunal 
or to the arbitration of the four great powers of Great Britain, France, 
Germany, and Italy. Germany had for years been nourishing the 
belief that England, France, and Russia were hemming her in with 
an iron ring of jealous hatred, to crush her industrial and commer- 
cial expansion. She had prepared the most, mighty military engine 
the world has ever seen and determined now to strike before she was 
struck. Self-defense was her plea, but to the majority of the nations 
her action looked like a deliberate piece of aggression to win "a 
place in the sun" for her colonial ambitions and to impose her 
" Kultur " on Europe by force of arms. Her first military move, the 
ruthless invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality Prussia had guaranteed 

497 



498 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

with the other great powers in the Treaty of 1839, provoked a storm 
of protest on both sides of the Atlantic.^ 

711. The Submarine PeriL The United States government de- 
clared its strict neutrality, but the people of the United States were 
not neutral. Their sympathies were overwhelmingly on the side of 
the Entente Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Serbia) 
against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The 
pressure of public opinion naturally affected our policy. When, for 
example, Great Britain, mistress of the seas, blockaded the coasts 
of Germany by mines sown in the North Sea, arbitrarily extended 
the list of contraband goods, seized our vessels and cargoes, the 
protests from Washington were so friendly that the German govern- 
ment accused us of being virtually England's ally. When Germany, 
on the other hand, resorted to the submarine and drew a "war 
zone" around the British Isles in order to starve them into sub- 
mission, we insisted on maintaining the freedom of the high seas. 
Germany's offense against neutral rights was incomparably more 
serious than England's, because whereas England seized property 
only, Germany destroyed lives. The submarine is a frail instru- 
ment of defense, being easily rammed by a powerful ship or de- 
stroyed by a single shot from a moderate-sized gun. Hence it will 
not expose itself to destruction by observing the rules of visit and 
search. It has no way of placing in safety the crew and passengers 
of a ship carrying contraband, before destroying ship and cargo. 
It strikes quickly, sending its torpedo on its swift and secret mission 
of death. It has been called the stiletto of the seas. The British 
seizures of ships and cargoes violated the rules of international 
law, but the German destruction of neutral and noncombatant lives 
outraged the dictates of humanity. For the former there could be 
redress and indemnity after the war ; for the latter there was 
no reparation. 

712. The Lusitania torpedoed. It was inevitable that American 
lives should be lost if Germany persisted in submarine warfare, 

1 Von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, confessed in a speech to the Reich- 
stag that the invasion of Belgium was " contrary to the dictates of international law " and 
promised to make reparation for the wrong when the German " military object " was obtained. 
" Necessity knows no law " was his plea. The " necessity " in this case was the rapid march 
on Paris by the most favorable route. He found the Treaty of 1839 o^ty " ^ scrap of paper " 
in the way. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 499 

unless American citizens renounced their privilege of traveling on the 
high seas and American ships remained moored to their wharves as 
in the days of Jefferson's embargo. Our government dispatched a 
note to Germany immediately after the war zone was traced (Feb- 
ruary ID, 1915), declaring that we should hold the Imperial Govern- 
ment to a " strict accountability " if an American vessel or the lives 
of American citizens were destroyed. Germany replied that it was 
not her intention to harm neutrals but that the destruction of 
England was necessary. She "expressly declined all responsibility 
for such consequences" as might follow if neutral vessels entered 
the zone. On May 7, 191 5, the civilized world was horrified by 
the news that the magnificent Cunarder Lusitanic. had been torpedoed 
off the Irish coast without warning and sent to the bottom with the 
loss of nearly 1200 lives, including 114 Americans. Germany de- 
fended this shocking act on the ground that the Lusitania had hidden 
guns below decks, was listed in the British navy, and was carrying 
thousands of tons of ammunition. The German government ex- 
pressed regret that American lives were lost, but insisted that their 
blood was on England's head.^ It refused to disavow the sinking of 
the Lusitania, declaring that "the German government has no 
guilt therein." 

713. The Sussex Pledge. President Wilson labored to keep the 
peace, expostulating with Germany in note after note, while public 
opinion in this country turned more and more to questions of mili- 
tary preparedness and national defense. Scattered cases of unpro- 
voked attacks on merchant ships, in which American lives were lost, 
added to the tension. When on March 24, 19 16, a German sub- 
marine torpedoed the French Channel steamer Sussex (on which 
it was thought Earl Kitchener was crossing to France), with the 
loss of American lives, President Wilson served an ultimatum on 
Germany. He recalled the patience of the American government, 
which had "hoped against hope that it would prove possible for the 

^ In further extenuation of the sacrifice of American lives the German government called 
attention to the warning which the German embassy at Washington had published in the 
American newspapers against neutrals sailing to the war zone on ships of Great Britain or 
her allies. This action was a gross breach of diplomatic courtesy. "A foreign minister is 
here," says John Bassett Moore, " to correspond with the Secretary of State. . . . He has 
no authority to communicate his sentiments to the people by publication, and any attempt 
to do so is contempt of this government" (" Digest of International Law," Vol. IV, p. 68). 



500 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Imperial Government so to order and control the acts of its naval 
commanders as to square its policy with the recognized principles 
of humanity." That hope proving vain, there was but one course to 
pursue : " Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately 
declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of sub- 
marine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, the 
United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations 
with the German Empire altogether." President Wilson was con- 
gratulated for having at last by patience won a diplomatic victory 
when Germany replied that she was "prepared to confine the opera- 
tions of the war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of 
the belligerents" and promised that "merchant vessels . . . should 
not be sunk without warning and without saving lives, unless the 
ship attempted to escape or offer resistance." At the same time 
Germany disavowed the act of the naval commander who sank the 
Sussex, and offered indemnity for the loss of American lives. It was 
hoped that the Sussex pledge had removed the danger of war between 
the United States and Germany. 

714. Our Aversion to War. Meanwhile the mass of the American 
people were coming to realize that the black cloud of war which hung 
over Europe threatened to reach our own shores. Our attachment to 
peace was strong. The warnings of Washington, Jefferson; and Mon- 
roe to keep this western republic out of the quarrels of European 
nations had been the basis of our foreign policy for over a century. 
Our country was the land of the immigrant : fully a third of our 
100,000,000 inhabitants were foreign born or of foreign parentage, 
and these people represented all the belligerent nations, with the 
preponderance largely on the side of the German and Austro- 
Hungarian Empires. The farmers of the West and the manufac- 
turers of the middle states, made prosperous by the large demands 
of Europe for our wheat, beef, steel, and iron, were slower than the 
merchants and bankers of the Atlantic coast to realize the danger 
to our land should the great naval power of England be destroyed by 
the German submarines. To the many thousands of pacifists, who 
abhorred war on principle, were added other thousands who advo- 
cated peace for the sake of profits. For after the first shock of war, 
which had closed European markets and led to financial panics, the 
Entente countries began to place huge orders in the United States. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 501 

We fell heir to a large part of Germany's commerce with Asia, 
Africa, and South America. Neutral powers, like Denmark, Hol- 
land, Norway, and Sweden, bought from five to ten times their 
ordinary purchases of American commodities. A great part of these 
purchases undoubtedly went across the frontier lines and the Baltic 
into Germany and Austria-Hungary. The excess of our exports 
over our imports was $691,000,000 in 1913 ; in 19 15 it jumped 
to $1,768,000,000, and for the first ten months of 1916 to 
$2,490,000,000. 

715. Germany's Acts of Provocation. But against all argu- 
ments, idealistic or materialistic, for neutrality were working the 
forces which month by month brought us closer to the decision of 
arms. As nation after nation joined the war, and the aims of Ger- 
many for world dominion became more and more evident, it was 
clear that the struggle was not merely a European fray but a world- 
decision between the ideals of autocracy and democracy. Every 
tradition of American history and every fiber of American sympathy 
was on the side of democracy. It seemed shameful that America 
should be content to grow fat on her prosperity, when all that could 
make prosperity a blessing in her land and in the world was threat- 
ened. Moreover, every month brought revelations of German and 
Austrian intrigues in our country, which made neutrality harder to 
maintain. Failing to gain their unreasonable demand that we should 
forbid the shipment of munitions because only their enemies could 
carry them,^ the Central Powers began a campaign of sabotage in 
the United States to hinder the manufacture and exportation of 
munitions. They promoted strikes in factories, set on fire and blew 
up plants, put bombs on British and French vessels in our harbors, 
and even encouraged a plot in Mexico to invade the United States. 
In September, 1915, Dr. Dumba, the Austrian ambassador, was dis- 
missed for his part in inciting the workers of the Bethlehem Steel 
Company to strike; and in December the recall of Captains 
Von Papen and Boy-Ed, the German military and naval attaches 
at Washington, was demanded on account of similar "improper 
activities." 

1 In reply to notes from Berlin and Vienna in the spring of IQ15, protesting against the sale 
of American munitions to the Entente Allies, our Secretary of State replied that not only was 
such sale sanctioned by international law but that Germany herself had freely sold munitions 
to the belligerent nations in the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan Wars. 



502 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

716. Preparedness. The advocates of military preparedness in 
America were active from the beginning of the war. A nonpartisan 
National Security League was formed in 19 14 to promote universal 
military training and service. The next summer, largely through the 
labors of General Leonard Wood, an officers' training camp was es- 
tablished at Plattsburg, N. Y. Since a strong navy had been for 
years a cherished American policy (our navy in 19 14 being inferior 
to England's and Germany's alone) it was easy for Secretary Daniels, 
in 19 1 5, to get Congress to adopt a three-year naval program, calling 
for the expenditure of $600,000,000 for new ships alone. But the 
nation was averse to much enlargement of its army of less than 
100,000 men. Participation in European wars was unthinkable, and 
for the defense of our country Secretary Bryan said that we could 
" raise a million men between sunrise and sunset." President Wilson 
in his message of December 8, 19 14, deplored a large standing 
army and declared that we must depend in times of peril ''on a 
citizenry trained and accustomed to arms" — that is, to a militia. 
The next December, however, he recommended a standing army of 
142,000 and a reserve force of 400,000. In January, 1916, he made 
a tour of the Middle West, recommending military preparation " as 
effective and prompt as possible," without "losing a day." Yet on 
his return to Washington, he refused to support Secretary Garrison's 
plan to enlarge the regular army to 400,000. Whereupon Secretary 
Garrison resigned (February 10, 19 16) and was succeeded by Newton 
D. Baker of Ohio, a lawyer with pacifist leanings. During the spring 
months of 19 16 Congress wrangled over the army bill, each party 
trying to make capital for the approaching presidential campaign. 
The National Defense Act which resulted, June 3, was a poor make- 
shift by which the federal government assumed the expense of train- 
ing the citizen armies in the states, without authority to federalize 
this militia or incorporate it into the regular army. 

717. Our Interests in the Caribbean. Problems raised by the 
great war occupied the attention of our government and people, 
almost to the exclusion of other matters.^ In normal times a lively 

1 The most important bills of the 64th Congress (1915-1917) were a Federal Child Labor 
Act, forbidding the entry into interstate commerce of products of mines and quarries in 
which children under sixteen were employed, or factories and canneries in which children 
under fourteen worked ; a Federal Workman's Compensation Act ; a Federal Farm Loan 
Act; the repeal of the free-sugar clause in the Underwood Tariff (continuing a revenue of 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



503 



controversy would have been waged in the nation over the extension 
of our power in the region of the Caribbean Sea. In September, 
19 1 5, we concluded an arrangement with Haiti by which the control 
of the revenues and the police of that republic passed into our hands. 
In the other half of the island, Santo Domingo, we had exercised a 
financial protectorate since Roosevelt's day, but did not interfere in 
the politics of the state until the spring of 19 16, when we landed 




THE UNITED STATES IN THE CARIBBEAN 



marines and proclaimed a military government on the island till the 
elections of the following January should be completed. On the 
mainland we established a virtual protectorate over Nicaragua (July, 
19 1 6), securing exclusive canal rights across the country, a naval 
base on Fonseca Bay, a ninety-nine year lease of the Corn Islands, 
and the right to intervene in Nicaragua to preserve order. Early in 
19 1 7 we gave citizenship to the inhabitants of Porto Rico and pur- 
chased for $25,000,000 the Danish islands of St. Thomas, St. John, 

$40, 000,000) ; a Philippine Government Act, enlarging the electorate and abolishing the 
Commission for a Senate ; and the Adamson Act, providing for an eight-hour day for rail- 
road employees. 



504 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

and St. Croix (the Virgin Islands). Little by little, through the 
intervention of special agents, the dispatch of warships and marines, 
formal treaties, and purchase, we had, by the close of Wilson's first 
administration, made ourselves the controlling power in the Carib- 
bean. If Wilson's policy here, as well as in South America and China, 
was less obviously for the support of big-business interests than Taft's 
so-called "dollar diplomacy,"^ it was nevertheless a steady enlarge- 
ment of America's power. 

718. The Presidential Campaign of 1916. Though the Demo- 
cratic platform of 19 12 had declared against a second term, there 
was no thought of replacing Wilson. When the campaign of 19 16 
approached there were several aspirants for the Republican nomina- 
tion, including Senator La Follette, Henry Ford (the millionaire 
automobile manufacturer who had financed the ''Peace Ship" — a 
Utopian expedition to the neutral countries in the late autumn of 
1915 to get the soldiers ''out of the trenches by Christmas"), 
Charles E. Hughes (a justice of the Supreme Court), and Theo- 
dore Roosevelt. For although the latter had not formally severed his 
connection with the Progressive party, he had been for some time 
drawing closer to the regular Republican organization. The Pro- 
gressives, who held their convention in Chicago in the same June 
days of 19 16 as the Republicans, nominated Roosevelt only a few 
minutes before the Republicans nominated Hughes. Roosevelt im- 
mediately sent a telegram from Oyster Bay, refusing to accept the 
Progressive nomination until he knew " the attitude of the candidate 
of the Republican party on the vital questions of the day," which 
meant that he would support Hughes if he was strong enough on 
preparedness and the assertion of American rights. The " defection " 
of Roosevelt made the Progressives withdraw from the presidential 
race. Hughes was a strong man with an enviable record. As gov- 
ernor of New York from 1907 to 19 10 he had devoted his administra- 
tion with great energy to liberal measures, breaking up the monopoly 
of private interests, fighting for open primaries against the party 
machine, and urging the creation of public service boards for the con- 
trol of public utilities. He had resigned in the last year of his second 

1 For example, the Taft administration was in favor of asking American bankers to join 
with the financial powers of Europe in a great loan to China (the "six-power loan"), with 
the privilege of supervising China's policy so as to secure the payment of the interest. But 
when Wilson came into power he withdrew from the project. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 505 

term as governor to accept an appointment by President Taft to 
the Supreme Court, and in his six years of service on that high 
tribunal he had written over one hundred and fifty opinions, all note- 
worthy for their sound legal knowledge and judicial temper. Former 
Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks was named as his running mate. 

719. "Americanism" the Issue. The campaign was waged al- 
most wholly on the issue of "Americanism." Hughes toured the 
country, urging a stronger national defense, a policy of firmness and 
consistency in Mexico, and the insistence of full American rights on 
the high seas. He sounded the keynote of his campaign in his speech 
of acceptance in Carnegie Hall, New York, July 31, 1916 : "An 
America conscious of its power, awake to its obligations, erect in self- 
respect, prepared for every emergency." He was somewhat of a dis- 
appointment as a campaign orator, lacking in the very vigor which 
he made his text. His friends attributed this to his six years of quiet 
on the Supreme Bench, while his enemies found the explanation in 
the lack of any real material for criticism in the Wilson administra- 
tion. Wilson remained at his " summer capital " of " Shadow Lawn" 
at Long Branch, New Jersey, receiving delegations of pilgrims every 
Saturday afternoon from September 23 to the end of the campaign. 
The Democrats pointed with pride to Wilson's record, commending 
him for keeping the country out of war ; while the Republicans as- 
serted that he had sacrificed the honor of the nation to preserve peace. 
"The election of Wilson," said Theodore Roosevelt, "means that we 
are ready to accept any insult, even the murder of our women and 
children, if only we make money." Hughes was criticized for " sully- 
ing the ermine " by descending from the dignity of the Supreme Court 
into the arena of politics. 

720. The Reelection of Wilson. The election proved to be one 
of the closest in our history. Before midnight of election day it was 
known that Hughes had carried the eastern states, together with 
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Telegrams of congratu- 
lation began to pour in on him, and he retired, confident of his 
election. The New York Times, a strong Wilson paper, appeared in 
its earliest morning edition on November 8 with large headlines con- 
ceding a " sweeping victory " for Hughes. But as the day advanced 
and the returns from the country districts were counted, Wilson's 
fortunes grew brighter. One after another, states that had been 



5o6 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

assigned to Hughes were transferred to the Wilson column. Thursday- 
night it became certain that Wilson had carried California, and with 
it the election. The electoral vote was 277 for Wilson and 254 for 
Hughes ; and the popular vote, 9,068,984 to 8,571,711. The Socialist 
candidate Benson received 487,651 votes, the Prohibitionist candi- 
date Hanly, 164,642, and the Socialist Labor candidate Reimer, 
10,105. 

721. Wilson defines the Peace Terms which America will 
Sanction. A single topic absorbed the country during the remaining 
months of Wilson's first term; namely, our relations to the World 
War in Europe. On December 12, 19 16, the German government, 
speaking in the tone of a victor to the vanquished, offered to meet the 
Entente Allies in a conference to discuss peace. But the Allies re- 
jected the offer as a '' sham proposal " intended only to divide them 
and strengthen the patriotic war sentiment in Germany. President 
Wilson attempted a mild form of mediation between the warring 
groups when he sent an identic note to all the belligerent powers, on 
December 18, asking them to state their terms for ending the war and 
guaranteeing the world against its renewal. A month later (January 
22, 191 7) Wilson addressed the Senate in a remarkable speech, declar- 
ing the conditions on which America would give "its formal and 
solemn adherence to a league of peace." It must be, he said, a peace 
that should satisfy the whole world ; a peace secured by the '' organized 
major force of mankind"; a peace guaranteeing the freedom of the 
seas and the security of small and weak nations ; and a peace based 
on the principle that "governments derive their just powers from 
the consent of the governed." "These are American principles, 
American policies," he declared. "We can stand for no others. And 
they are also the principles of forward-looking men and women 
everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. 
They are the principles of mankind, and must prevail." 

722. The Break with Germany. Indignant at the reply of the 
Entente to her proposals of December 16, and ignoring President 
Wilson's appeals, Germany issued a proclamation on January 31, 
191 7, enlarging the war zone and removing all former restrictions 
on her submarine warfare. She offered to let the United States send 
one passenger ship a week (very plainly marked on hull and funnels) 
through a narrow lane of safety to the English coast. This breach 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



507 



of the Sussex pledge President Wilson met on February 3, 191 7, by 
breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. "We do not desire 
any conflict with the German government," he said. "We are the 
sincere friends of the German people, and earnestly desire to remain 
at peace with the government which speaks for them. We shall not 




GERMAN WAR ZONE OF JANUARY 31, 1917 



believe that they are hostile to us until we are obliged to believe it, 
and we purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense of the un- 
doubted rights of our people." 

723. The Arming of American Merchantmen. During the 
month of February, 191 7, the German submarines sank 200 ships, 
of which 51 were neutrals, with a tonnage of 456,000. To send 
American vessels unarmed to meet such risk as these figures show 



5o8 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



would have been sheer folly. Wilson therefore asked Congress on 
February 26, 191 7, for the power to arm American merchant vessels. 
The House readily passed the bill by a vote of 403 to 13, but eleven 
senators, taking advantage of the Senate rule which allows unlimited 
debate, refused to let the bill come to a vote before the expiration 
of Congress at noon on March 4, 191 7. In spite of this resistance of 
"a little group of willful men," the President, relying on the advice 
of his Attorney-General and Secretary of State, proceeded to arm 



1 



* . 6 



■Hittra- -*-• 'a i^r^^«««'.i 




Copyright Times Photo Service 
AMERICAN ARMED LINER SAILING FOR THE WAR ZONE 

the ships. The American liner St. Louis soon afterwards left New 
York with guns fore and aft, and safely traversed the danger zone. 

724. The Declaration of War with Germany. President Wilson 
had called the 65th Congress to meet in extra session April 16, to 
consider the pressing questions of national defense. But the con- 
tinued aggressions of the L^-boats, as the submarines were called, 
coupled with the popular protest roused by the revelations of an 
intercepted dispatch of the German foreign minister Zimmermann to 
the German minister in Mexico, suggesting an alliance of Germany, 
Mexico, and Japan against the United States in case our countr\^ 
entered the war, and offering INIexico as her reward the recover^' of 
her "lost provinces" of Texas and New ^Mexico, determined Wilson 
to advance the date of meeting by two weeks. On the evening of 
April 2, 19 1 7, the President appeared before Congress to deliver one 
of the most momentous messages in the histor>' of our countr\\ De- 
claring that the '' irresponsible German government " had " cast aside 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



509 



all considerations of hmnani^^' and was "ntnnii^ sanadk." among 
the nations, he asked Congress to recognize that the coarse erf 
the German government was "nothing less than war against the 
people and government of the United States,'* and to accept formally 
the status of belligerent which had been forced upon ns. "We 
have no quarrel with the German people/' said the President, " bat 
only with the military despotian of Germany, JA^ w<!?r?</ wrwr/ be 




■made safe jor democracy. . . . We desire no conquest of donmiicm. 
. . . We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. 
We shall be satisfied when these rights have been made as secure as 
the faith and the freedom of nations can make tban."' 

A resolution declaring a state of war with Germany and en^xnrer- 
ing the President to carry on war with all the power of our nation 
was passed through the Senate by a vote of 86 to 6 on the fourth of 
April and was adc^ted by the House (373 to 5c). after a sixteen- 
Lour debate, early in the morning of Good Friday, April 6, 19 17. 

' For the first time in over a centurj* we were at war with a first-class 

,i foreign power. 



510 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Participation 

725. Why Neutrality was Ended. President Wilson in his Flag 
Day address at Washington, June 14, 191 7, summed up the reasons 
why our neutrality, maintained with increasing difficulty for thirty- 
two months, finally came to an end. ''It is plain enough how we 
were forced into the war. The extraordinary insults and aggressions 
of the Imperial German Government left us no self-respecting choice |^ 
but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of 
our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters of Ger- 
many denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspect- 
ing communities with vicious spies and conspirators, and sought to 
corrupt the public opinion of our people in their own behalf. When 
they found that they could not do that, their agents diligently spread 
sedition amongst us and sought to draw our citizens from their 
allegiance. . . . They sought by violence to destroy our industries 
and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up 
arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her. 
They impudently denied us the use of the high seas, and repeatedly 
executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our 
people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. . . . What 
nation, in such circumstances, would not have taken up arms ? . . . 
The flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we 
withheld our hand." 

726. America's War Aims. But however numerous and varied 
the offenses of Germany which finally drove us into war. we accepted 
the challenge with a single aim and purpose. Again and again — 
in his war message to Congress of April 2, 191 7 ; in his Flag Day 
address of June 14, 191 7 ; in his reply to the Pope of August 27, 

1917 ; in his enumeration of the ''Fourteen Points" of January 8, 

1918 ; in his Baltimore address of April 6, 1918 ; in his speech at 
Washington's tomb of July 4, 1918 ; in his speech at the New York 
Metropolitan Opera House of September 27, 19 18 — President Wil- 1 
son reiterated the simple truth that we were fighting only to over-f 
throw the hateful system of Prussian military autocracy and to 
establish government by the consent of the governed throughout the 
civilized world. " The great fact," he said, " that stands out above 
all the rest is that this is a peoples' war, a war for freedom and 



^/ 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



S" 



justice ... a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live 
in it and who have made it their own." In these statements the 
President had the enthusiastic approval of the press and the people 
of our country. In the heat of this noble purpose the feeling of 
vengeance for the insults and injuries which Germany had heaped 
upon us was fused into the pure passion of a crusade for humanity. 




Canadian Official War Fliotograph 

RUINS OF THE CLOTH HALL TOWER, YPRES, BELGIUM 
Destroyed by the Germans 



727. Europe's Need. Our task was immense. The Allied nations, 
which for two and a half years had borne the brunt of the apparently 
inexhaustible attack of the German military machine, were in sore 
need of munitions, money, food, men, and ships. In the very month 
when the United States entered the war the German submarine at- 
tack reached its peak. That month 800,000 tons of shipping, mostly 
British, were sent to the bottom of the ocean, and the German press 
was boasting a destruction of 1,000,000 tons a month, which was to 
bring Great Britain to her knees before summer. France was " bled 
white." Her rich regions of coal and iron, her vineyards and fac- 
tories, were in the bauds of the invaders. One out of every six of 



512 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

her population had been called to the colors. The exhausted men on 
the battlefields of Flanders and Champagne needed all the supplies 
that our wealth could furnish, needed our surgeons and nurses and 
ambulances, needed most of all the presence of American troops — 
the visible proof that a new, fresh, and powerful nation had come to 
their aid. Immediately after our entrance into the war, the British 
and French governments sent missions to this country to place their 
information and experience at the disposal of our government and to 
advise how our aid could best be organized. The British mission, 
headed by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur J. Balfour, and the French 
mission, headed by Marshal Joffre, the hero of the Marne, and Rene 
Viviani, the eloquent Minister of Justice, received an enthusiastic 
welcome, which was later extended to Belgian, Italian, and Russian 
missions. 

728. The Task of Congress. The Congress which had been 
called in extra session, April 2, to receive the President's war mes- 
sage, immediately set to work to raise and equip our armies, to en- 
large our shipping, to stimulate our agriculture and our manufactures, 
and to provide the huge sums of money necessary to make our 
weight felt as soon as possible as a decisive factor in the war ; 
while the President began to assume the great powers intrusted 
to our executive as commander in chief of the army and na\y 
of the United States. 

729. Raising an Army. Our army numbered only a little over- 
200,000 men. We needed millions. Congress passed the Selective 
Service Act, May 18, requiring all men between the ages of twenty- 
one and thirty inclusive to register for military service. On June 5 
some 9,500,000 wer? thus enrolled. Six weeks later numbers were 
drawn by lot in Washington, each number drawn calling into the ser- 
vice the man of the corresponding registration number in each of the 
4500 local boards of the country. After careful physical examination 
and the consideration of causes for exemption, the 687,000 men re- 
tained for the service were distributed among sixteen cantonments in 
as many states ; while the national guard, a militia called into federal 
service, were sent to sixteen other camps. These thirty-two training 
camps, with all their apparatus of barracks, hospitals, shops, lighting 
and heating plants, water supply, and sewage systems, were built in 
a few months' time at a cost of $2oo,ooo,qoo. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



513 



730. Pershing in France. On the same day that the Selective 
Service Act was passed, President Wilson announced that Major- 
General John J. Pershing would command the American Expedi- 
tionary Force in France. General Pershing and his staff reached Paris 
on June 13 and were received with tumultuous demonstrations of wel- 
come. A dramatic incident of Pershing's arrival was his visit to the 
grave of Lafayette, on which he deposited a wreath of flowers. The 
debt of gratitude which we had owed 
to France for one hundred and forty 
years was to be paid. The first 
American soldiers landed in France 
towards the end of June, after two 
encounters with submarines, and 
month by month they continued to 
arrive, passing first into camps for 
intensive training, then to the front, 
and finally (October, 191 7) into the 
first-line trenches. President Wilson 
wrote to them : " The eyes of all 
the world will be upon you, because 
you are in some special sense the 
soldiers of freedom. Let it be your 
pride, therefore, to show all men 
everywhere what good soldiers you 
are but also what good men you are. 
Keep yourselves fit and straight in 
everything and pure and clean 
through and through." 

731. Our Navy. The navy, better prepared than the army, 
through the generous appropriations of former Congresses, was mo- 
bilized on the day war was declared, and 87 ships of the German 
merchant marine in our ports were taken over. A fleet of our 
destroyers reached European waters on May 4 to cooperate with the 
British and French in hunting the submarines. Battleships and 
cruisers followed in June and took their place in the line of the 
British Grand Fleet which was bottling up the German warships in 
the harbor of Kiel. The Emergency Fleet Corporation made pro- 
visions for the rapid construction of supply ships and troopships. 




GENERAL PERSHING 

From a painting by J. F. Bouchor, 

Official Painter to the French 

Armies 



514 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

When we entered the war we had only 13 of these service ships, with a 
weight of 94,000 tons. By the end of the war our fleet had increased 
to 2 1 13 ships with a tonnage of over 5,000,000. The cost of our navy 
and auxiliary ships in the two years 191 7 and 1918 ($3,833,000,000) 
was about equal to their entire cost from 1794 to 19 16. We carried 
to French ports alone, during the war, 7,500,000 tons of cargo, 
including locomotives, freight cars, automobiles, trucks, rails, and 
food supplies, of which only 1.6 per cent was lost in transit. The 
transports, especially the great Leviathan taken over from the Ger- 
mans, with its capacity for 11,000 troops, plied back and forth with 
the regularity of a ferry, carrying over 2,000,000 soldiers to France. 
Somewhat more than half these men were carried in British ships, 
but America furnished over 82 per cent of the naval convoys. Only 
a single troopship, the Tuscania, was sunk by submarines on its 
eastern voyage. 

732. The Air Service. All former wars had been waged on land 
or on the surface of the sea, but the World War was carried on 
beneath the seas and in the air as well. The airplane was an Amer- 
ican invention, like the submarine, but in spite of an appropriation 
by Congress of $614,000,000 for the air service, our contribution to 
that branch of the war was slight at first. We had but two small 
aviation fields and about 300 second-rate planes in April, 191 7, so 
that our aviators were trained mostly in French, English, Italian, and 
Canadian schools. We sent millions of feet of spruce from the forests 
of our Northwest to help build planes abroad, but it was not till 
the spring of 19 18 that our airmen were flying over the German 
lines. As in every department of the war, our help in the air service 
grew marvelously during the summer of 1918. We had over 50,000 
men abroad in the air service at the signing of the armistice, and were 
producing 1500 planes and 5000 motors a month. Over sixty of our 
airmen won the distinction of "aces" — that is, fliers who had brought' 
down at least five enemy planes. It was the American aviator, in the 
end, that turned the balance of the war in the air to the side of the 
Allies and hastened the day of Germany's surrender. 

733. Food Conservation. Of no less importance than these 
direct military contributions to the war was the part played by 
America in feeding the armies and the civilian population of the 
Allies. On May 15, 191 7, Herbert C. Hoover, whose splendid 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



515 



management of the Belgian Relief Commission had kept the people 
of Belgium and the devastated portions of France from starvation, 
was appointed Food Administrator of the United States, with large 
powers of control over the conservation and distribution of food 
supplies. A thoroughgoing Food Control Act was signed by the 
President, August 10, forbidding the raising of prices or the restriction 
of supply, punishing hoarding, and authorizing the President to fix 
the price of wheat. ^'Food will win the war — don't waste it!" 
was the slogan. Meatless and wheat- 
less days were prescribed. The 
people of the country responded 
with hearty cooperation. Farmers 
planted a larger acreage. Hotels 
and restaurants saved wheat and 
sugar. Families pledged themselves 
to eat corn bread and drink un- 
sweetened coffee. Even the children 
planted ''war gardens." The Food 
Administration, served by an army 
of volunteer workers, was handling 
the purchase and distribution of 
foodstuffs to the value of $300,- 
000,000 per month at the close of 
the war. Some idea of the magni- 
tude of the conservation movement 
may be gained from the following figures of our exports in 19 17- 
19 1 8, as compared with the average of the three-year period before 
the war. Exports of beef increased from $186,000,000 to $565,- 
000,000; of pork, from 996,000,000 to 1,691,000,000 pounds; of 
grain, from 183,000,000 to 349,000,000 bushels; of sugar, from 
621,000,000 to 2,149,000,000 pounds; of dairy products, from 
26,000,000 to 590,000,000 pounds. The total value of our food 
contributions to Europe in 19 18 was over $2,000,000,000. 

734. Control of Transportation and Fuel. The production and 
conservation of food and the manufacture of munitions, however, 
would have been to no purpose if these supplies could not reach 
their destination in Europe. In order to move them to the great 
shipping ports and to carry them overseas the government had to 



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© Underwooci ami Uiuierwood 

HERBERT C. HOOVER 



5i6 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

take control of the transportation system and coal production of the 
country. Priority orders gave coal and iron, wheat and meat, pref- 
erence over private shipments on freight lines. A fuel administrator 
was appointed in August, 191 7, whose representatives were sent to 
every mining region of the country to stimulate production. On 
December 27, 19 17, President Wilson took over the railroads of 
the United States, assuring the owners that their interests would 
be ''as scrupulously looked after by the government as they could 
be by the directors of the several railways systems." Secretary of 
the Treasury McAdoo was made Director-General of the railroads, 
which were to be returned to their owners within twenty-one months 
after the close of the war. They were to receive a yearly rental from 
the United States based on their average annual earnings from 
June, 1914, to June, 191 7. The Director-General authorized the 
expenditure of $938,000,000 for improvements and equipment during 
19 1 8 and increased the wages of the railroad men that year by 
$300,000,000. Owing to the increase of wages and the rise in the 
price of material of all sorts, the railroads lost hundreds of mil- 
lions of dollars under government management. The large express 
companies also were merged into a single concern to handle the 
government's shipments, and the telephone and telegraph lines passed 
under the control of the Postmaster-General. To conserve fuel, 
heatless days and lightless nights were observed, illuminated adver- 
tising signs were extinguished, and the time was advanced an hour 
during the spring and summer months to "save daylight." When 250 
laden ships were detained at our ports in January, 19 18, for lack 
of coal in their bunkers, the fuel administrator shut down for a period 
of five days all the manufacturing plants of the country east of the 
Mississippi River. 

735. America's Generosity. No finer example of patriotism was 
ever offered than the ready self-denial with which the people of the 
country supported the government in these measures. Labor agreed 
to waive its right to strike during the war. Thousands of men left 
highly paid positions to place their expert knowledge at the service 
of the government for a dollar a year. Newspapers and magazines 
gave space freely to help the cause of public and private charities. 
A nation accustomed to lavish spending dispensed with its luxuries to 
aid the various welfare organizations. The Red Cross, the Salvation 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



517 



Army, the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Bosrd, the 
Y. M. C. A., the War Camp Community Seivice asked for hundreds 
of millions of dollars, and never asked in vain. '" It is estimated,'' 
says Mrs. Florence Kelly in her stirring book "What America Did," 
" that the American people contributed to these several welfare pur- 
poses close to $4,000,000,000." And this was all a tree-vvili offering 
over and above the heavy taxes imposed by the government and 
the subscription to four Liberty Loans aggregating $17,000,000,000. 
736. War Tajces and Liberty Loans, It was the policy of the 
government to meet approximately one third of its war expenses by 
taxation. During the summer of 1917 a War Revenue Bill for raising 
$2,000,000,000 was debated in Congress. As finally passed in Octo- 
ber it provided for an increased income tax, excess profits taxes 
ranging from 20 to 60 per cent, increase in postal rates, and a variety 
of taxes on amusements, luxuries, transportation, and business 
transactions. But these taxes were trivial as compared with the 
revenue bill introduced into the House in the autumn of 19 18 and 
signed by the President the following February. It called for over 
$6,ooO;00o,ooo, the largest sum ever levied by a government on its 
people at one time. Most of the money came from the incomes of 
rich individuals and corporations. The normal rate on incomes 
above $4000 was raised to 12 per cent, with graded surtaxes reach- 
ing 65 per cent on incomes above $1,000,000. Until our entrance 
into the World War our government had not been accustomed to ask 
the people to come directly to its support by the purchase of its bonds. 
But in May, 191 7, the first Liberty Loan of $2,000,000,000 was of- 
feired for popular subscription in bonds ranging from $50 to $10,000 
each. It was followed by three other Liberty Loans before the 
signing of the armistice, each larger than its predecessor and each 
oversubscribed by enormous amounts : 





Number of Loan' 


Date 


Amount 


Rate 


Subscription 


Number of Subscribers 


First 
Second 
Third 
Fourth 


May, 191 7 
Oct., 1917 
April, 1918 
Oct., 1918 


$2,000,000,000 
3,000,000,000 
3,000,000,000 
6,000,000,000 


3i 
4 

4i 
4i 


^3,035,000,000 
4,617,000,000 
4,176,000,000 
6,988,000,000 


4,000,000 

9,400,000 

18,300,000 

21,000,000 



1 A fifth great popular loan, the Victory Loan " to finish the job," was announced by the 
Treasury, April, T919. It called for ;f4, 500,000,000 at 4^ per cent interest, and was taken by 
15,000,000 subscribers. Like the four Liberty Loans it was heavily oversubscribed. 



51 8 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

In addition to financing our own war expenses and raising billions 
of dollars for private relief and welfare work, we loaned nearly 
$10,000,000,000 to the allied governments of Great Britain, France, 
Italy, Belgium, and Serbia, 

737. Opposition to the War. Though there was considerable 
activit)'^ among the confirmed advocates of peace to keep us out of 
the war up to the very eve of our decision, when that decision was 
once made opposition ceased, except for some aliens and that small 
and disloyal part of our citizens made up of I. W. W. agitators, 
certain sections of the Socialists,^ and the partisans or paid agents 
of Germany and Austria. To counteract the work of enemy aliens 
in obstructing the draft, destroying property, and advocating treason 
to the United States, a severe Espionage Act was signed by President 
Wilson on June 15, 19 17. Conscientious objectors to war were al- 
lowed to perform noncombatant service in the medical, the quarter- 
master's, and the' engineering corps. Those drafted men whose 
conscience would not permit them to serve in military uniform were 
allowed to work on farms under surveillance of the War Depart- 
ment. Less than 500 men refused to comply with the military laws 
of the country. They were imprisoned, along with those who ob- 
structed the draft or plotted disloyal acts. 

738. Conditions of Peace Defined. The German government af- 
fected at first to feel no concern over the entrance of the United 
States into the war. They despised our ''undisciplined" army and 
believed that their submarines would bring the war to a victorious 
close before we could render any military aid to the Allies. But 
as the summer wore on and the submarine sinkings diminished, 
while the American contingents began to land in France, the Ger- 
mans changed their tone. The Pope, prompted by a desire to end 
the slaughter in Europe, suggested peace negotiations on August 
II, to which President Wilson replied a fortnight later, stating em- 
phatically that we could not " take the word of the present rulers of 
Germany as a guaranty of anything that is to endure, unless ex- 
plicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose 

1 On July 7, 1917, the Socialists condemned our entrance into the war by a referendum 
vote of 21,639 to 2752, showing that the party was dominated by German sympathizers. 
Whereupon a number of prominent Socialists, including John Spargo, William E. Walling, 
J. G. Phelps Stokes, Upton Sinclair, and Allan Benson (the presidential candidate in 1916)4 
withdrew from the party. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



519 



of the German people themselves as the other peoples of the world 
would be justified in accepting." The German Reichstag disclaimed 
any purpose of annexing territory or exacting indemnities, and the 
kaiser talked much of his love of peace. But as the Reichstag was 
powerless in the face of the military authorities, and as the kaiser 
continued to maintain the preposterous falsehood that he was fighting 
on the defensive against a group of bloodthirsty nations that had 
attacked Germany, there was 
little hope for peaceful nego- 
tiations. On January 5, 1918, 
Premier Lloyd George, in a 
speech to the British Trades 
Unions Congress, declared that 
peace could come only on the 
basis of the sanctity of treaties, 
of complete restoration and 
reparation by Germany, of a 
territorial settlement secured 
by the consent of the gov- 
erned, and of "some inter- 
national organization to limit 
the burden of armaments and 
diminish the probabilities of 
war." Three days later Presi- 
dent Wilson laid before Con- 
gress his famous "Fourteen 

Points "^ — a detailed program for world peace. They included open 
diplomacy, the freedom of the seas, the removal of economic barriers, 
the reduction of armaments, the reparation of wrongs committed in 
the war, the principle of self-determination, and a league of nations. 

739, The Great German Drives. Meanwhile American military 
plans were being pushed with vigor. By the end of October, 191 7, 
we had sent over 100,000 men to France, and on November 3 our 
troops had their baptism of fire at the front. In a desperate attempt 
to win the victory before the immense resources of America should 
be thrown into the scale against them, the Germans, on March 21, 
1918, launched the first of a series of five tremendous attacks on the 
British and French armies, driving great wedges, or " salients," into 




CANTIGNY 

Cartoon by Cassel, The World, 
New York 



520 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



the Allied line.^ Mile by mile they pushed the British and French 
back, until at the beginning of June they were at the Marne again, 
only forty miles from Paris, with 45,000 prisoners in their hands. 
It was at this crisis that the fresh American troops came to the sup- 
port of the sorely tried Allied armies who were fighting " with their 
backs to the wall." On May 28 American soldiers in France cap- 
tured their first town of Cantigny. They helped the French stop 




Copyright, U.S. Official 



"yanks" bringing in GERMAN PRISONERS 



the Germans at Chateau-Thierry a few days later, and toward the end 
of June seized Belleau Wood, which has been rechristened '^'The 
Wood of the Americans." 

740. Americans on the Battlefield. Ferdinand Foch, the most 
brilliant of the French strategists, was made generalissimo of the 
Allied forces in March, 19 18, and General Pershing put all the 

1 The German army was greatly reenforced for these drives by fresh troops from the 
Eastern front, relieved by the utter collapse of the Russian army. The Russians had over- 
thrown the despotism of the Czar in March, 191 7, but the moderate revolutionists, under 
Kerensky, were not able to maintain themselves. The government fell into the hands of the 
Bolshevist leaders, Lenine and Trotzky, who in the spring of igiS concluded the disgraceful 
peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, deserting their Allies and sacrificing the integrity of 
their country. 






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AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



521 



American troops at his disposal.^ Foch began his comiterdrive 
against the Germans in July. Assigned to a distinct sector near 
Verdun and the Argonne Forest^ the American troops, in their first 
independent offensive early in September, brilliantly wiped out the 
salient of St. Mihiel, which the Germans had maintained for four 




^aWITZKRLAKDj 



MAP SHOWING AMERICAN OPERATIONS IN EUROPE 

years. Further north two American divisions, cooperating with the 
British army, broke the proud Hindenburg line in the face of a terrific 
artillery and machine-gun fire. The crowning work of the American 
troops was the magnificent Argonne-Meuse drive (September- 
November, 19 18). Twenty-one divisions, comprising 1,200,000 
men, many of whom had never been in battle before, faced forty 
divisions of trained German troops. The scene of the conflict was 



1 The Americans were arriving rapidly by midsummer, 1918. In March 83,811 reached 
France ; in April, 117,222 ; in May, 244,345 i ^^ June, 276,372. 



52*2 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



the Argonne Forest, which no army had ever tried to penetrate before, 
and which the French officers declared impregnable, "Day after 
day the American troops moved slowly forward, over rugged, difficult 
ground, broken by ravines and steep hills, through dense underbrush, 
in the face of deadly fire from artillery and nests of machine guns 
hidden in every vantage point, through incessant rain and mud and 
fog and penetrating cold, pushing the enemy steadily back, until 
they reached Sedan, cut the German army's most important line 
of communication, and so brought the end of the war in sight." In 
that wonderful movement the Americans advanced 25 miles and 



Germany 


In Dollars 
39,000,000,000 


Men Killed in Battle 
1,600,000 


British Empire 


38,000,000,000 


900,000 


France 


26,000,000,000 


1,385,000 


United States 


22,000,000,000 


49,000 


Austria 


21,000,000,000 


800,000 


Russia 


18,000,000,000 
13,000,000,000 


1,700,000 


Italy 


462,000 



COMPARATIVE COST OF THE WAR TO SEVEN CHIEF BELLIGERENTS 

captured 26,000 prisoners (some of them of the kaiser's crack regi- 
ments), with 490 guns. Marshal Foch's laconic comment on the 
drive was, " The American soldiers are superb ! " 

741. The Armistice. Driven back at every point from France 
and Belgium, and practically deserted by her allies,^ Germany realized 
that the game was up. The new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, 
an avowed peace man, asked President Wilson (October 4) to invite 
all the belligerent countries to send envoys to a conference to nego- 
tiate peace terms on the basis of the Fourteen Points. After a brief 
exchange of notes with the Central Powers, the Allied War Council 



1 Bulgaria was brought to an unconditional surrender by the French General d'Esperey 
on September 30. The British General Allenby, who had restored Jerusalem to Christian 
hands after nearly seven centuries of uninterrupted Turkish rule, conquered the whole of 
Palestine. The Italian troops, aided by British and French units, had driven the Austrians 
back behind the Piave River and repaired the losses of the disastrous rout of Caporetto. 
Bulgaria was thus already beyond help, and it was clear that the other two allies of Germany 
could not hold out much longer. 




INDEPENDENCE DAY. AMERICAN SOLDIERS SALUTING THE STATUE OF 
WASHINGTON, PARIS, JULY 4, 1918 

From a painting by J. F. Bouchor, Official Painter to the French Armies 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 523 

at Versailles arranged the terms for an armistice. On November 3 
the Austro-Hungarian government signed the terms, and on Novem- 
ber II, two days after the kaiser had abdicated and fled to Holland, 
the plenipotentiaries of the new German Republic signed. Hostilities 
ceased at 11 a. m. on November 11, 1918. The Germans agreed to 
the immediate evacuation of the territory of France, Belgium, Alsace- 
Lorraine, and Luxembourg. German armies were also to be with- 
drawn from all German territory on the left bank of the Rhine, and 
from a strip ten kilometers wide on the right bank, extending from 
the frontier of Holland to the frontier of Switzerland. Allied and 
American troops were to occupy the left bank and to garrison the 
three great centers of Mayence, Coblentz, and Cologne. Furthermore 
the Germans were to surrender all their submarines, 50 destroyers, 
and 24 warships ; to hand over vast stores of cannon, machine guns, 
airplanes, locomotives, freight cars, and motor trucks ; to repatriate 
all prisoners and exiles, to make reparation for the damage done by 
their invading armies, and to pay for the upkeep of the Allied 
armies of occupation. 

742. The End of the War. The signing of the armistice was 
hailed with wild demonstrations of joy in the United States. Our 
losses in battle were trivial as compared with those of the nations 
who for years had borne the brunt of war in the field. Less than 
50,000 Americans were killed, somewhat over 50,000 died of disease, 
and of the 240,000 wounded five sixths were restored for duty again. 
The loss in the navy was 10,000. Thousands of families mourned 
their valiant dead, but to millions of families the cessation of hos- 
tilities meant the lifting of a great weight of anxiety and appre- 
hension. For we were planning to have between 4,000,000 and 
5,000,000 men on the battlefields of Europe by midsummer of 1919. 
Our great adventure was crowned with success. "The vision for 
which we fought" was won. "It will now be our fortunate duty," 
said President Wilson in a proclamation to his fellow citizens on the 
morning the armistice was signed, " to assist by example, by sober 
friendly council, and by material aid, in the establishment of just 
democracy throughout the world." 



I 



524 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 



Problems of Peace 

743. America Mol*ilized. When the order came to cease firing 
on the Western front we were just getting into our war stride. Sol- 
diers were flowing from American camps to France at the rate of 
10,000 a day. Seventy-five thousand tons of supplies were sent over 
in October, 19 18, as against 16,000 tons in June, 191 7. A fleet of 431 
troopships and cargo ships were plying across the ocean ferry, while 

386,000 men were at work in 
our shipyards on a program of 
construction laid out by our 
Emergency Fleet Corporation, 
calling for 13,000,000 tons of 
shipping. The Man Power Act 
of August 31, 19 1 8, called into 
the service all men between the 
ages of 18 and 45. Over 13,- 
000,000 were registered under 
it on September 12, and pro- 
vision was made for enrolling 
the younger men as Students' 
Army Training Corps (the 
S. A. T. C.) at government ex- 
pense in some 500 colleges and 
technical schools. The government's mobilization of industry was 
complete. A number of administrative boards (Shipping, War Trade, 
War Industries, Labor, Censorship, Food Administration, Fuel Admin- 
istration, Railroad Administration, Employment Service, Industrial 
Housing, War Finance Corporation, etc.) had taken out of private 
hands practically all the business of the country that had any bear- 
ing on the conduct of the war. Factories and foundries had been 
converted into munitions plants. An Alien Property Custodian^ had 

1 A. Mitchell Palmer of Pennsylvania, who succeeded Secretary Gregory as Attorney- 
General on March 4, 1919. Other changes in Wilson's cabinet since the war have been the 
replacement of William G. McAdoo in the Treasury by Carter Glass (December 5, 1918), 
who in turn resigned in January, 1920, to take the place in the United States Senate vacated 
by the death of T. S. Martin of Virginia. He was succeeded by the Secretary of Agriculture, 
D. F. Houston, whose place was filled in turn by E. T. Meredith of Iowa. In December, 
1919, J. W. Alexander, of Missouri, succeeded William C. Redfield as Secretary of Com- 
merce. Early in 1920 Franklin Lane resigned from the Department of the Interior, and 




HOW THE AMERICAN DOLLAR WAS 
SPENT IN THE WAR 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 525 

taken over German and Austrian industries in the United States to the 
value of $700,000,000. Millions of people were working for the gov- 
ernment, millions more were creditors of the government. Through 
the War Risk Bureau $40,000,000,000 of insurance was issued to sol- 
diers and sailors. Never had our government come into such intimate 
relations with its citizens. Demobilization meant not only getting our 
men back from France, and into civil employments, but also the 
restoration of our political and industrial life to a peace basis. 

744. Tasks for the Peace Council. Naturally the first task was 
the conclusion of a treaty of peace. The European governments 
were chiefly interested in the settlement of specific questions, like the 
adjustment of boundaries, the restoration of territory, the reparation 
for damages, the rebuilding of shattered industries, the disposal of 
Germany's colonies, the limitation of her economic growth, the 
destruction of her military and naval power, and the guaranty of 
new states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia. President 
Wilson's primary interest was in the establishment of a League 
of Nations, which should make war less probable in the future and 
transfer from the diplomats and military leaders to the people the 
control of the destinies of states. ^'As I see it," he said in an address 
in New York, September 27, 1918, *'the constitution of that League 
of Nations and a clear definition of its objects must be a part, and 
in a sense the most essential part, of the peace settlement itself." 

745. President Wilson goes to Paris. As the champion of this 
idea, President Wilson believed that his presence at the Peace Con- 
ference at Paris was necessary. He appointed as his colleagues 
Colonel Edward M. House, his intimate friend and adviser, Secretary 
of State Lansing, General Tasker H. Bliss, and Henry M. White, 
former ambassador to France. Immediately after sending his mes- 
sage to the final session of the 65th Congress, he sailed for France, 
December 4, accompanied by a large staff of expert advisers. The 
peace conference held its opening session January 18, 19 19. Thirty- 
two nations were represented in the plenary council, but the important 

his place was taken by John B. Payne of Chicago, chairman of the United States Shipping- 
Board. The whole country was surprised when President Wilson asked for the resignation 
of Secretary of State Lansing (February 7, 1920) on the ground that he had " usurped " the 
president's prerogative by holding meetings of the cabinet during the president's illness. 
On February 25 Wilson nominated as Lansing's successor Bainbridge Colby, a lawyer of New 
York, who had been a supporter of Roosevelt in the Progressive campaign. The Senate 
delayed Mr. Colby's confirmation for about three weeks. 



52 6 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

decisions were made by a Supreme Council, comprised of the chair- 
men of the delegations of the five leading powers — the United States, 
Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Later the council was 
narrowed to four members — President Wilson and Prime Ministers 
Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. 

746. The League of Nations. A covenant of a League of Nations 
prepared by a committee of ten was reported to the conference by 
President Wilson in February and in slightly amended form was in- 
corporated into the peace treaty. The chief provisions of its 26 
articles concern the reduction of armaments, the publicity of treaties, 
the arbitration of international disputes, and the punishment of 
nations that go to war in defiance of the covenant. The famous 
Article X declares that "the members of the league undertake to 
respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial 
integrity and existing political independence of all members of the 
league." Article XVI gives the council the right to recommend to 
the various governments what military and naval forces they shall 
contribute to enforce obedience to the covenant. The executive 
power of the League was intrusted to a council of nine members, 
of whom live were to be always representatives of the United States, 
Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. As soon as the provisions 
of the covenant were known in America more than one third of the 
Senate (that is, enough to defeat the treaty) signed a round robin 
declaring their opposition to the document ''in the form now pro- 
posed," and advocating making peace with Germany first and then 
discussing plans for a League of Nations. But Wilson insisted on 
the immediate establishment of the league. On the eve of his return 
to Paris in March, 1919 (after a brief visit to the United States), he 
said, "When the treaty comes back, gentlemen on this side will find 
the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied 
to the covenant that you cannot dissect it from the treaty without 
destroying the whole vital structure." 

747. Opposition to Wilson in the Senate. The peace treaty was 
signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, and the President immediately 
brought it home to lay before the Senate for ratification. Opposition 
was strong from the beginning. In the first place the 66th Congress, 
which Wilson had called in extra session by cable from Paris (May 
19, 1919), was Republican in both Houses. Wilson had made the 



AMERICA AND THE WOEG.D WAR 527 

mistake of appealing to the public just before the autumn elections 
of 19 1 8 to return a Democratic Congress — after having said in a 
message six months earlier, "politics is adjourned." The result of 
the President's partisan appeal was a Republican majority of 45 in 
the House and 2 in the Senate. Furthermore, the Senate had not 
been taken into the President's confidence in the negotiation of the 
treaty. Not a senator was appointed on the peace commission and it 
was only as guests at informal luncheons at the White House, during 
the President's brief "vacation" in America (February-March, 
19 19), that some of the leading senators were acquainted with his 
plans. The President later sent word from Paris that he did not want 
the treaty discussed until he returned to America. The treaty was 
published in Europe, and copies reached private citizens here before 
the official copy was presented to the Senate. 

748. Criticism of the League of Nations. But aside from any 
feeling of resentment that they had been "ignored" by the Presi- 
dent, many senators were opposed to various articles in the treaty 
and especially in the covenant of the League of Nations. The points 
of complaint were that the sovereignty of the United States was 
sacrificed, that we were pledged to make war at the bidding of the 
council of the league, that we would be eternally embroiled in the 
quarrels of Europe, that purely domestic questions like immigration 
laws and the tariff were subjected to the interference of other nations, 
that Great Britain was represented by six times as many votes in the 
assembly of the league as we were. About a dozen senators, led by 
Borah of Idaho, were opposed to the treaty altogether ; but the 
majority, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, chairman of 
the Foreign Relations Committee, were in favor of ratifying with 
certain amendments or reservations. The administration senators, 
obeying the behest of the President, insisted that the treaty must 
be ratified without any modifications. The amendments and reserva- 
tions proposed would, said Wilson, "take the teeth out of the treaty." 

749. The Treaty Rejected. In September President Wilson started 
on a tour across the country to explain the treaty to the people at 
large and create a public sentiment which should force the Senate 
to ratify. In the midst of the trip the President suffered a severe 
physical breakdown, due to many months of mental overstrain, and 
was hurried back to Washington, where he was completely removed 



52 8 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

from public business. His spokesman in the Senate, Mr. Hitchcock 
of Nebraska, carried on the fight for unconditional ratification. 
Neither side would budge. When the vote was finally taken (No- 
vember 19, 19 19) on the treaty with fifteen Lodge reservations 
attached, it was defeated by a vote) of 39 to 55.^ The extra session 
came to an end the same day, with each party in the Senate throwing 
on the other the blame for the deadlock. When the first regular 
session of the 66th Congress convened on December i, President 
Wilson announced from his sick room that he would not resubmit 
the treaty to the Senate, but would shift the responsibility for its 
adoption to the shoulders of his countrymen. In other words, unless 
the Senate should choose to reconsider its position, the treaty might 
become the issue of the presidential election of 1920. The Senate 
again took up the treaty, the debate centering chiefly on Article X„ 
Both Mr. Lodge and the administration senators seemed more 
anxious to arrive at a compromise; but again (March 19, 1920) 
the treaty was rejected by a vote of 49 in favor to 35 against. 

750. The Railroad Situation. Although discussion of the treaty 
and the League of Nations was the most absorbing topic of the 
nation after the signing of the armistice, and occupied the attention 
of the Senate almost to the exclusion of other business, nevertheless 
grave problems connected with our return to a peace basis were press- 
ing for solution. The telegraph, telephone, and cable lines were re- 
stored to private ownership in the summer of 19 19, but the opening 
of the new year saw the railroads still in the hands of the government 
and no plan agreed on for their return.^ The two years of government 
operation had been far from successful. For 19 18 the deficit was 
$200,000,000, and in the first ten months of 19 19 it mounted up to 
$192,000,000 more. While the revenues increased 40 per cent, the 
expenses increased over 80 per cent, due to the high price of all 
materials and to advances in wages amounting to $580,000,000. As 
the roads had been taken over by the government with the assurance 

1 A number of previous votes showed that the majority of the Senate favored some form 
or other of amendment or reservation. On November 7 Lodge's "preamble," requiring 
three other great powers to accept our changes before the treaty became valid, passed by a 
vote of 48 to 40. On November 15 ten other reservations were adopted by about the same 
vote. Senator Underwood's motion that the treaty be adopted "without the dotting of an i 
or the crossing oi a i" was defeated by 53 votes to 38. 

2 On December 24 President Wilson issued a proclamation fixing March i, 1920, as- the 
date of the return of the railroads to their owners. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 529 

that their interests would be scrupulously looked after, it would have 
been unfair to hand them back to their owners burdened with an 
enormous deficit and with 39 per cent of their stock paying no 
dividends. 

751. Conflicting Plans for the Solution of the Railroad 
Problem. Many plans were proposed for the disposition of the 
roads. The railway executives recommended private ownership and 
management under federal regulation, with the legal prohibition of 
strikes and lockouts and the settlement of labor disputes by the 
government. The stockholders wanted the government to guarantee 
6 per cent on their invested capital, while any profits above this 
sum should be distributed equally between the employees, the owners, 
and a fund for improvements. Mr. Glen E. Plumb, counsel for the 
railroad brotherhoods, advocated a plan of public ownership. The 
government should buy the roads and operate them through a cor- 
poration composed one third of railroad employees, one third of 
managers, and one third of members appointed by the president. 
The government should receive a rental of 5 per cent out of the 
revenues from the roads, and half of any excess should go to the 
employees. If a deficit resulted instead of a surplus, it should be 
made up by public taxation. Labor disputes were to be settled by 
wage boards. On November 17, 19 19, the elaborate Esch Bill, over 
80 pages long, was passed by the House. Its main provisions were 
( I ) immediate return of the roads to private ownership, ( 2 ) deduc- 
tion of the $775,000,000 spent by the government from the rental 
due the companies, (3) advancement to the companies of public 
capital for five years at 6 per cent interest, (4) settlement of labor 
disputes by boards of adjustment. Finally, in December, 1919, the 
Senate passed the Cummins Bill, providing for the division of the 
country into railroad '' regions " and the merging of the roads into 
18 or 20 systems. The revenues were to be pooled in each region, 
the successful roads paying for the losses of the unsuccessful ones. 
The Esch Bill and the Cummins Bill were so far apart that it seemed 
hardly possible that a compromise could be arrived at by the two 
Houses before the date (March i, 1920) set by the President for the 
relinquishment of government management. 

752. The Cummins-Esch Bill. By dint of hard labor, however, 
the conflicting views were reconciled in the Cummins-Esch Bill, or 



530 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Transportation Act of 1920, which was adopted (February 21) by the 
House by a vote of 250 to 150, and by the Senate (February 23) by 
a vote of 47 to 17. President Wilson, in spite of the protests of 
the railway workers and the Farmers' National Council that 
the bill was flagrantly unfair to labor, signed the bill on February 28, 
and two days later the railroads reverted to their former owners. 
The main provisions of the bill were (i) the enlargement of the 
powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission (increased to eleven 
members), which should fix rates so as to yield a return of 5^ per 
cent on the estimated valuation of the railroads and could control the 
issue of securities; (2) the creation of a Railway Labor Board of 
nine members appointed by the President — three from the railroad 
workers, three from the owners, and three from the public — to 
settle labor disputes; (3) the appropriation of $200,000,000 to aid 
the roads to get back to their prewar status, and of $300,000,000 as a 
"revolving fund" out of which loans to the roads should be 
made; (4) the prohibition of any increase in rates or decrease in 
wages before September i, 1920; (5) the provision that no man 
should serve as officer or director of more than one road after 
December 31, 192 1. 

753. Industrial Unrest. The relations of capital and labor have 
been the gravest problem of the country since the signing of the 
armistice. During the war there was a truce in the long struggle 
between these two economic rivals. Labor, under the lead of Samuel 
Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, proved its 
patriotism and thorough Americanism by refraining from any strikes 
that would interfere with war production. Over 1000 cases of dis- 
pute, involving 500,000 employees, were submitted to the War Labor 
Board, and most of them settled quickly and peaceably. But after 
the cessation of hostilities industrial strife broke out again in a 
perfect epidemic of strikes. Dockmen, shiphands, firemen, garment 
workers, textile workers, silk makers, carpenters, builders, miners, 
telegraph operators, street-car men, steel workers, expressmen, police- 
men, hotel waiters, barbers, followed each other out of their jobs, 
until it seemed as if the industry of the country were completely 
demoralized. Many causes contributed to this industrial unrest in 
the country : the return of the soldiers to civil life, the rapidly 
mounting war prices, which labor charged to the greed of profiteers 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 531 

. . :d capital charged to the outrageous demands of the wage earner, 
""No one who has observed the march of events in the last year," 
said the President in his message of December, 19 19, to Congress, 
"can fail to note the absolute need of a definite program to bring 
about an improvement in the conditions of labor. There can be no 
settled conditions leading to increased production and a reduction 
in the cost of living, if labor and capital are to be antagonists instead 
of partners. . . . The only way to keep men from agitating against 
grievances is to remove the grievances. . . . The unwilling work- 
man is not a profitable servant. . . . We are a partnership or nothing 
that is worth while. We are a democracy where the majority are the 
masters, or all the hopes and purposes of the men who founded this 
government have been defeated or forgotten." But a conference, com- 
posed of representatives of capital, labor, and the public, which 
President Wilson called together at Washington in October to devise 
methods for better industrial relations, broke up in discord, 

754. The Great Coal Strike. The most serious of the many 
strikes of 19 19 was inaugurated on November i, when, in spite of 
Wilson's plea for the maintenance of a full supply of fuel for the 
world's need, 400,000 men in the bituminous coal fields laid down 
their tools to enforce their demands for a 60 per cent increase in 
wages and the guaranty of a minimum of thirty hours of work a 
week. As we were still technically at war with Germany, the Lever 
Act of 19 1 7, giving the President the power to regulate the fuel 
supply, was still in force. H. A. Garfield was appointed fuel ad- 
ministrator under its provisions, November 5, and three days later a 
federal judre of Indianapolis enjoined the officers of the United 
Mine Workers to end the strike before November 11, on pain of 
punishment for " rebellion against the government in time of war." 
Mr. John L. Lewis, acting president of the union, complied with 
the order, remarking, "We are Americans, we cannot fight against 
the government." Though the strike was called off, the men were 
slow in returning to work. The cold days of December came on 
with only about 40 per cent of the normal production of coal. The 
governors of some states took over the coal mines within their bor- 
ders, and volunteers came forward to work them. Meanwhile the 
fuel administrator, the Secretary of Labor, and the mine operators 
and workers were seeking to arrive at a satisfactory settlement. 



532 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

Garfield proposed a 14 per cent increase in wages, Secretary V he 
a 3 1 per cent increase ; but the miners declared both inadec^ 
Finally, on December 11, the miners agreed to return to work on 
Garfield's terms, pending a final adjustment of wages and hours. 
The operators quarreled with the administration, on the ^ md that 
Secretary Wilson arranged terms with the miners over their heads, 
and threatened to raise the price of coal if Garfield's terms were 
altered. Garfield himself resigned. The strike was over, but it 
was not till the end of March, 1920, that a settlement was made on 
the basis of a wage increase of 27 per cent. The strike had cost 
$125,000,000, of which nearly half was in loss of wages. 

755. The "Reds" in America. A sinister element in the labor 
situation was the presence of a number of radical agitators, whose 
confessed object was not the attainment of reasonable demands for 
better conditions and higher wages through peaceful negotiation but 
the overthrow of the industrial system of the country and the appro- 
priation of all its wealth by the laborers. These apostles of " direct 
action" were the Industrial Workers of the World (the I. W. W.), 
organized in 1904 in America. For ten years they had comparatively 
little influence in our labor world, but with the disordered conditions 
brought on by the World War, and especially with the triumph of 
the Bolshevists in Russia, their power grew. They entered the unions 
with the purpose of "boring from within," stirdng discontent where 
it had not existed before, and preaching revolution as the remedy. 
Their violent methods recommended the wrecking of property and 
the destruction of life. The red flag was their banner ; bombs were 
their weapons ; revolution was their aim. Many of them were aliens 
from the desperate classes in Europe. In the autumn of 19 19 a 
round-up of these men was made by the agents of the Department 
of Justice in many of the cities of the country, and on December 22 
over 200 of them were deported to Russia on the ''Red Ark," as 
the United States transport Bujord was called. President Wilson in 
his December message to Congress said : "With the free expression 
of opinion and with the advocacy of orderly political change, how- 
ever fundamental, there must be no interference ; but towards passion 
and malevolence tending to incite crime and insurrection under the 
guise of political evolution there should be no leniency. . . . The 
instrument of all reform in America is the straight road of justice. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 533 

. . . Let those beware who would take the shorter road of disorder 
and revolution." The American Federation of Labor, in a conference 
representing 119 unions at Washington, in December, 1919, re- 
pudiated the doctrines of the I. W. W., and adopted by an over- 
whelming vote the resolution that the Federation was "an American 
institution believing in American principles and ideals." 

756. The Eighteenth Amendment. A movement in favor of the 
prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, which 
for some years had been carrying state after state into the "dry" 
column, culminated in December, 191 7, with the passage through 
Congress of an Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing 
for nation-wide prohibition to go into effect one year after the rati- 
fication of the amendment. With Nebraska's ratification, January 
16, 19 19, the assent of the necessary 36 states was obtained, and the 
amendment went into effect on January 16, 1920. Meanwhile, as 
a war measure for the conservation of grain, the Food Production 
Bill of November 21, 1918, forbade the manufacture of intoxicating 
liquors after July i, 1919, until the "completion of demobilization." 
This law was not strictly obeyed, but when the "wet" interests sought 
to get relief from the courts, in order that they might dispose of their 
large stocks of liquor before the constitutional amendment went into 
effect, their hopes were dashed by a unanimous decision of the 
Supreme Court, December 15, 19 19, upholding the law. Thus the 
year of grace given to the liquor interests by the amendment was 
denied them by the war-time prohibition. 

757. Woman Suffrage. The House passed an amendment grant- 
ing woman suffrage in January, 19 18, but, in spite of the President's 
repeated recommendations, it was not until eighteen months later 
that the necessary two-thirds majority was secured in the Senate 
by the narrow margin of 56 to 25 votes. By the close of 19 19 only 
22 states had ratified the amendment; but the National Woman 
Suffrage Association was determined that the necessary 36 states 
should be secured before the opening of the presidential campaign. 
Their untiring zeal won state after state, until Tennessee, on 
August 28, 1920, completed the list. Thus the electorate of the 
country was enlarged by some eight million voters in the presidential 
contest of 1920 between Senator Warren G. Harding and Governor 
James M. Cox, both of Ohio. 



534 



THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 




758. The Election of Harding. In the popular mind the issue 
of the election of 1920 was America's ratification of the Treaty of 
Versailles and participation in the League of Nations. Governor Cox 
accepted the Democratic plank calling for "the immediate ratifica- 
tion of the treaty without reservations which would impair its i 

essential integrity." His candidacy 
was cordially indorsed by Presi- 
dent Wilson. Senator Harding was . 
in favor of ''an international agree- 
ment" to put an end to war, but 
opposed to the League of Nations 
in the form in which it was em- 
bodied in the treaty. Burdensome 
taxation, the high cost of living, 
industrial unrest, and a general 
reaction against an administration 
in which many saw the exercise 
of arbitrary power account for the 
overwhelming victory of the Re- 
publicans at the polls. Harding 
and Coolidge were elected by the 
unprecedented popular majority of 
16,140,585 to 9,141,621. The vote 

in the electoral college was 404 to 127. A Republican majority was 

returned to both Houses of Congress. 

759. The Washington Conference. Although the United States 
Senate had rejected the League of Nations and the Treaty of Ver- 
sailles, the country at large was glad when Senator Borah, a bitter 
opponent of the League and Treaty, moved, in an extra session of 
Congress called by President Harding in April, 1921,^ as an amend- 
ment to the naval appropriation bill of $494,000,000, that the presi- 
dent be asked to invite the two great naval powers of the Old World, 
England and Japan, to a conference to consider the limitation of 

1 The extra session lasted from April n to November 23, and passed a number of impor- 
tant measures, including an emergency tariff, a new tax bill, a bill restricting immigration, a 
resolution declaring the war with Germany and Austria- Hungary at an end, a budget act, a 
farm-loan act, a veterans' bureau act, etc. The Senate ratified a treaty with Colombia which 
had been pending since the early days of the Wilson administration, paying Colombia 
#25,000,000 for the loss of Panama and admitting her to equal privileges with the United 
States in the use of the Panama Canal. 



WARREN G. HARDING 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



535 



naval armaments and the "pacification of the Pacific." More than 
two years had passed since the Armistice, and yet there was war in 
many quarters, and the nations were staggering under the weight not 
only of tremendous war debts but of military and naval preparations 
for "the next war." The United States had inaugurated a program of 




THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE 



shipbuilding under Secretary Daniels which would have made it by 
1924 the strongest naval power of the world. 

It was with eager satisfaction, therefore, that the foreign govern- 
ments accepted President Harding's invitation. France and Italy 
were included, as important naval powers, and China, the Nether- 
lands, Belgium, and Portugal, as nations with large interests in the 
Far East. Delegates from eight European and Asiatic powers, there- 
fore, assembled at Washington for the opening of the conference on 
November 12, 192 1. Secretary of State Hughes, the chairman, fairly 
electrified the great assembly when, instead of speaking in the 
cautious language of diplomacy, he proposed a "naval holiday" for 
ten years, and offered on the part of the United States to sacrifice 30 
battleships and cruisers (15 in process of construction), totaling 
845,740 tons. He asked Great Britain to scrap 23 ships of 585,375 
tons, and Japan 13 ships of 448,928 tons — a total reduction of about 
2,000,000 tons of the world's navies. He proposed a naval ratio of 



536 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 

5:5:3 for the three powers (525,856 tons for the United States, 
582,050 for Great Britain, and 313,300 for Japan). France and Italy- 
agreed to an allotment of 175,000 tons each of capital ships. Great 
Britain quietly abandoned her policy of maintaining a navy equal 
to the combined fleets of her two strongest possible rivals. 

Besides this most important treaty of the five powers on the 
limitation of naval armaments, the conference produced six other 
agreements, namely: three four-power treaties (the United States, 
Great Britain, France, Japan) guaranteeing the peace of the Pacific 
and terminating the Anglo- Japanese alliance, two nine-power treaties 
safeguarding the interests of China, and a five-power treaty regulat- 
ing the use of submarines and poison gas in warfare. The conference 
adjourned on February 6, 1922, and four days later President Harding 
presented the seven treaties to the Senate, asking for a speedy rati- 
fication to prove that our expressed desire to promote world peace 
was not "a hollow mockery." 

760. The Strength of America. The close of the second decade 
of the twentieth century found the United States facing problems of 
immense difficulty in the adjustment of its political, industrial, and 
social life, but strong and confident to meet them. Enormous as the 
cost of the war had been, increasing our debt twenty-fold, the ex- 
pense had been met by willing payment of taxes and by enthusiastic 
oversubscription to the nation's bonds. While the debt of some of 
the belligerent countries mounted up to nearly 50 per cent of their 
national wealth, and in the case of Italy to nearly 80 per cent, 
the interest on our own debt amounted to but 3 per cent of our 
estimated annual income of $50,000,000,000. Our country was 
spared both the devastation of its territory and the decimation of 
its man power in the war. Production of every kind was stimu- 
lated. More wheat and live stock were raised, more steel and textiles 
manufactured, than ever before in our history. Markets were clamor- 
ing for our goods in all parts of the world. Our foreign trade, in- 
creasing 500 per cent over the pre-war figures, reached a total for 
the year 1919 of $10,079,888,111 (exports, $7,074,011,529; imports, 
$3,005,876,582) — "a figure," says the report of the Secretary of 
Commerce, "never approached in the commerce pf any nation in the 
world." The American merchant marine, which had sunk to insignifi- 
cance since the Civil War, was created anew by the World War. 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 537 

American ships now ply over 40 regular trade routes, and the Amer- 
ican flag is now regularly seen in ports where but a few years ago it 
was as strange as the Chinese dragon. 

761. The New American State. The American state is taking 
on "new functions and new powers year by year. A generation ago 
the government was thought of primarily as a police power. Its 
attitude toward business and social problems was chiefly negative. 
Now it is interested, through administrative boards and by copious 
legislation, in a thousand and one concerns of production and distri- 
bution, of industrial regulation, of social betterment, of international 
cooperation. Aggressive presidents like Roosevelt and Wilson have 
brought the government close to the people. The Congresses of 
other days sat for a few months of the year, and their rather per- 
functory acts were scantily noticed by the press and the public. 
From the entrance of America into the World War to the close of 
the year 19 19 Congress was in session for twenty-eight out of thirty- 
three months, and its debates were conducted before a forum of 
100,000,000 citizens. 

762. The Problems of American Democracy. The war came 
like a great searchlight to reveal both the latent powers and the 
hidden dangers of our new democracy. Disloyalty and greed, igno- 
rance and violence, have appeared, as well as courage, patriotism, 
sacrifice, and devotion. We have a serious race problem on our 
hands in the just treatment and constructive education of 10,000,000 
American negroes. The examining boards discovered that "25 per 
cent of the 1,600,000 men between twenty-one and thirty years of 
age who were first drafted into our army could not read, or write 
our language." Every year hundreds of thousands of aliens come 
to our shores to enjoy the opportunities offered here for making a 
better living. Merely taking out naturalization papers will not make 
them Americans. Herded in the slums of our cities or driven in 
gangs of laborers to the mills and mines, these people can escape 
the evil influence of the preachers of disloyalty, lawlessness, and 
class hatred only by being taught the basal principles of American 
democracy — respect for law, the responsibilities of freedom, and the 
duty of each citizen to make himself as capable as possible of partici- 
pating in the common task of securing social justice. The day of the 
heartless exploitation of human lives for the sake of profits must 



538 THE REPUBLIC SINCE THE CRTL WAR 

cease. The little children, "the seed-com of the nation.'" must not 
be taken from the school and from the sunlight to toil in the cigar 
factories, the canning sheds, the cotton mills, and the coal breakers. 
We must have healthy parents and happy homes; for the home is 
the ultimate life-cell of our society, conditioning its soundness or 
its decay. 

763. American Idealism. America has often been called "the 
land of the dollar." as if we cared for nothing but sordid material 
gain. The histon,' of the last few years has proved how false that 
judgment is. When the clear call came for the defense of an ideal 
against the ruthless assertion of brute force which knew no law, 
Americans rich and poor, high and low. rallied to the banners of 
right with the fer\^or of the crusaders of old. They poured out their 
money like water : they gave their lives with joy. Their presence on 
the battlefields of Europe was an inspiration like the breath of a 
new morning. "They came because they saw on the other side of 
the blood}' abyss that vision for which the}- had always fought — a 
world without war. poverty, preventable disease, idle rulers, ill-paid 
workers, ignorance, and hopeless toiling millions. They fought to 
build the road to a society in which peoples should determine 
their own destiny in government and in all things that concern the 
common good." 

References 

Neutrality: F. A. Ogg, National Progress (American Nation Series), chaps, 
siv, XV, xvii, xxi; Bertram Benedict, A History of the Great War, Vol. I, pp. 
169-281 ; J. B. McM^STER, The United States in the World War, Vol. I, 
chaps, i-xiii; Robecsox and West, The Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson; 
A. !NLArRiCE Low, Woodro'jj Wilson, an Interpretation, chaps, vii-lx; Woodrow 
WiLSOK, Presidential Addresses and State Papers (1917); C. Lloyd Joxes, The 
Caribbean Interests of the United States, chaps, ii, vii-x; American Academy 
of Political and Social Science, Annals, \'o\. LX ("Americas Interests as af- 
fected by the European War"), Vol. LXII (".\merica"s Relation to the Worid 
Conflict""). 

Participation: McMaster, Vol. I (chaps, xiii-xvii), Vol. II; Benxdict, 
Vol. I, pp. 282-412; Florence F. Kelly, What America Did; Frederick 
Palmer, A7nerica in France, and Our Greatest Battle; J. S. Bassett, Our War 
'ivith Germany; R. G. Usher, The Story of the Great War; Joseph Husban*d, A 
Year in the Navy ; J. C. Wise. The Turn of the Tide ; H. P. DA^^so^-, The 
American Red Cross in the Great War; W.alter Weyl, The End of the War; 
De Ch-^ibrun and De Marexches, The American Army in the European 
Conflict; G. J. Hecht, The War in Cartoons; Erxest Peixotto, The American 



AMERICA AND THE WORLD WAR 



539 



Front; The American Year Book (1917, 1918) ; C. J. H. Hayes, A Brief History 
of the Great War, chaps, x-xv. 

Problems of Peace: E. J. Dillon, The Inside Story of the Peace Con~ 
ference; E. M. Friedman (ed.), Americatt Problems of Reconstruction; Ord- 
WAY Tead, The People's Part in Peace; E. L. Bogart, The Direct and Indirect 
Costs of the Great World War; Norman Angell, America and the New World 
State; J. G. Brooks, American Syndicalism, the I. W. W.; E. J. Clapp, The 
Economic Aspects of the War; T. W. Van Metre (ed.), Railroad Legislation 
(Academy of Political Science, Proceedings, Vol. VIII) ; Adams and Sumner, 
Labor Problems, Books II-V; Nicholas Murray Butler, Is America Worth 
Saving? E, A. Steiner, Nationalizing America. 



Topics for Special Reports 

1. The Adamson Act: Ocg, pp. 353,-3(>3; E. J. Clapp, in the Yale Review, 
Vol. VI, pp. 25S-275; E. G. RoBBiNS, The Trainman's Eight-Hour Day (Political 
Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, pp. 541-55?) I The Review of Reviews, Vol. LIV, 
pp. 389-393 ; T. R. Powell, The Supreme Court and the Adamson Law {The 
University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. LXV, pp. 3-27). 

2. National Defense: Ogg, pp. 384-390; Bassett, pp. 71-79, 114-130; 
Hayes, pp. 219-224; Hart and Lovejoy, Handbook of the War, pp. 83-94 
(with references appended) ; Lane and Baker, The Nation in Arms (War In- 
formation Series, No. 2) ; George H. Allen and others. The Great War, Vol. IV, 
pp. 474-478; Samuel Gompers, American Labor and the War, pp. 50-68; New 
York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. Ill, pp. 18-22, 488- 
495, 685-687, 818, 1088-1092. 

3. Should Immigration be Restricted? Adams and Sumner, pp. 80-1 11; 
P. F. Hall, Immigration, pp. 309-323; R. Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immi- 
gration, pp. 266-302; James Bryce, The American Commonivealth (edition of 
1911), Vol. II, pp. 469-490; Francis Walker, Discussions in Economics and 
Statistics, Vol. II, pp. 417-451. 

4. The American Army at St. Mihiel and the Argonne: Bassett, pp. 
229-282; Hayes, pp. 326-334; F. P. Sibley, With the Yankee Division in 
France, pp. 257-281; R. S. Tompkins, The Story of the Rainbow Division, pp. 
102-144; New York Times Current History, Vol. IX, pp. 228-236, 526-539, and 
January, 1920, pp. 50-68 (General Pershing's Report). 

5. A League of Nations: New York Times Current History, Vol. X, pp. 
287-292 (text), pp. 87-108 (discussion); Gompers, pp. 69-82; Bassett, 348- 
358; J. B. Moore, The Peace Problem (North American Review, Vol. CCIV, 
pp. 74-89); Tead, pp. 7-26; Pamphlets of the World Peace Foundation 
(Boston): The Covenanter (Letters on the League), No. 3, June, 1919; Joint 
Debate on the Covenant of Paris (by Heney Caboi Lodge and A. Lawrence 
Lowell), No. 2, April, 1919. 



APPENDIX I 

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE^ 

In Congress, July 4, 1776 

A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED 
STATES OF AMERICA, IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED 

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people 
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and 
to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to 
which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect 
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes 
which impel them to the separation. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident: — That all men are created equal; 
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that 
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure 
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just 
powers from the consent of the governed ; that, whenever any form of gov- 
ernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to 
alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation 
on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall 
seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will 
dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light 
and transient causes ; and accordingly all experience hath shown that man- 
kind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right 
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when 
a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, 
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, 
it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for 
their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies ; 
and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former 
systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is 

1 The original copy of the Declaration of Independence is kept in the Department 
of State in Washington. The Declaration was adopted July 4, 1776, and was signed by 
the members representing the thirteen states August 2, 1776. John Hancock, whose 
name appears first among the signers, was president of the Congress. 



ii APPENDIX I 

a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the 
establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let 
facts be submitted to a candid world. 

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for 
the public good. 

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing 
importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be 
obtained ; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. 

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts 
of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in 
the legislature — a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only. 

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, 
and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose 
of fatiguing them into compliance with his measure. 

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly 
firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people. 

He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to 
be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have 
returned to the people at large for their exercise ; the State remaining, in 
the mean time, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without, and 
convulsions within. 

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States ; for that 
purpose obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners ; refusing to 
pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of 
new appropriations of lands. 

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to 
laws for establishing judiciary powers. 

He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their 
offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. 

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of 
officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. 

He has kept among us in times of peace, standing armies, without the 
consent of our legislatures. 

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the 
civil power. 

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our 
constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws ; giving his assent to their 
acts of pretended legislation : 

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us ; 

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders 
which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States ; 

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world ; 

For imposing taxes on us without our consent ; 

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury ; 



DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ill 

For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences ; 

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, 
establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so 
as to render it at once an example aftd fit instrument for introducing the same 
absolute rule into these colonies ; 

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, 
fundamentally, the forms of our governments ; 

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested 
with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. 

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, 
and waging war against us. 

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and 
destroyed the lives of our people. 

He is at this time transporting large armie^of foreign mercenaries to com- 
plete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circum- 
stances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, 
and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. 

He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to 
bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends 
and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. 

He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to 
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose 
known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, 
and conditions. 

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the 
most humble terms ; our repeated petitions have been answered only by 
repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which 
may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. 

Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We 
have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to 
extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of 
the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed 
to their native justice and magnanimity ; and we have conjured them, by the 
ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would 
inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have 
been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, 
acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, 
as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. 

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in 
General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world 
for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of 
the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare. That these 
united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; 
that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all 



IV 



APPENDIX I 



political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought 
to be, totally dissolved ; and that, as free and independent states, they have 
full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, 
and do all other acts and things which ihdependent states may of right do. 
And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection 
of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, 
and our sacred honor. 

The foregoing Declaration was, by order of Congress, engrossed, and signed 
by the following members : 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 

JOSIAH BaRTLETT 

^William Whipple 
Matthew Thornton 

MASSACHUSETTS BAY 

^Samuel Adams 

John Adams 

Robert Treat Paine 
' Elbridge Gerry 



k 



RHODE ISLAND 



/- 



Stephen Hopkins 
William Ellery 



/n 



CONNECTICUT 

Roger Sherman 
Samuel Huntington 
William Williams 
Oliver Wolcott 



NEW YORK 

William Floyd 
^/Philip Livingston 



^Francis Lewis 
Lewis Morris 



JOHN HANCOCK 

NEW JERSEY 

Richard Stockton 
John Witherspoon 
Francis Hopkinson 
John Hart 
Abraham Clark 

PENNSYLVANIA 
JBjObert Morris 

Benjamin Rush 

Benjamin Franklin 

John Morton 
/George Clymer 

James Smith 

George Taylor 

James Wilson 

George Ross 

DELAWARE 

C^SAR Rodney 
George Read 
Thomas M'Kean 

MARYLAND 

Samuel Chase 
William Paca 
Thomas Stone 



Charles Carroll, of 
Carrollton 

VIRGINIA 
George Wythe 
Richard Henry Lee 
Thomas Jefferson 
Benjamin Harrison 
Thomas Nelson, Jr. 
Francis Lightfoot Lee 
Carter Braxton 

NORTH CAROLINA 
William Hooper 
.Joseph Hewes 
John Penn 

SOUTH CAROLINA 
Edward Rutledge 
Thomas Hayward, Jr. 
Thomas Lynch, Jr. 
Arthur Middleton 

GEORGIA 

Button Gwinnett 
Lyman Hall 
George Walton 



Resolved, That copies of the Declaration be sent to the several assemblies, 
conventions, and committees, or councils of safety, and to the several com- 
manding officers of the continental troops ; that it be proclaimed in each of 
the United States, at the head of the army. 



APPENDIX II 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 

Preamble 

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, 
estabhsh justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, 
promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves 
and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United 
States of America. 

ARTICLE I. LEGISLATIVE DEPARTMENT 

Section i. Congress 

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the 
United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.^ 

Section 2. House of Representatives 

Election of Members. The House of Representatives shall be composed of 
members chosen every second year by the people of the several States, and 
the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors 
of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature. 

Qualifications. No person shall l e a representative who shall not have 
attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven years a citizen of 
the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that 
State in which he shall be chosen. 

Apportionment. Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among 
the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their 
respective numbers,^ which shall be determined by adding to the whole num- 
ber of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and 
excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.* The actual 

^ The term of each Congress is two years. It assembles on the first Monday in 
December and " expires at noon of the fourth of March next succeeding the begmning 
of its second regular session, when a new Congress begins." 

2 The apportionment under the census of 1910 is one representative for every 212,407 
persons. 

3 The word " persons " refers to slaves. The word " slave " nowhere appears in the 
Constitution. This paragraph has been amended (Amendments XIII and XIV) and 
is no longer in force. 



VI APPENDIX ir 

enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the 
Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten 
years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of repre- 
sentatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State 
shall have at least one representative : and until such enumeration shall be 
made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three ; Massa- 
chusetts, eight; Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, one; Connecticut, 
five; New York, six; New Jersey, four ; Pennsylvania, eight ; Delaware, one ; 
Maryland, six ; Virginia, ten ; North Carolina, five ; South Carolina, five ; 
and Georgia, three. 

Vacancies. When vacancies happen in the representation from any State, the 
executive authority ^ thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies. 

Officers. Impeachment. The Plouse of Representatives shall choose their 
Speaker^ and other officers; and shall have the sole power of impeachment. 

Section 3. Sexate 

Number of Senators : Election. The Senate of the United States shall be 
composed of two senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, 
for six years; and each senator shall have one vote. [Repealed in 1913 by 
Amendment XVII.] 

Classification. Immediately after they shall be assembled in consequence of 
the first election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three classes. 
The seats of the senators of the first class shall be vacated at the expiration 
of the second year; of the second class, at the expiration of the fourth year; 
of the third class, at the expiration of the sixth year, so that one-third may be 
chosen every second year ; and if vacancies happen by resignation, or other- 
wise, during the recess of the Legislature of any State, the executive ^ thereof 
may make temporary appointments until the next meeting of the Legislature, 
which shall then fill such vacancies. [Modified by Amendment XVII.] 

Qualifications. No person shall be a senator who shall not have attained to 
the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States, 
and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he 
shall be chosen. 

President of Senate. The Vice-President of the United States shall be presi- 
dent of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided. 

Officers. The Senate shall choose their other officers, and also a president 
pro tempore, in the absence of the Vice-President, or when he shall exercise 
the office of President of the United States. 

Trials of Impeachment. The Senate shall have the sole power to try all im- 
peachments : When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. 

1 Governor. 

2 The Speaker, who presides, is one of the representatives ; the other officers — clerk, 
sergeant-at-arms, postmaster, chaplain, doorkeeper, etc. — are not. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES vii 

"When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief-Justice shall 
preside : and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two- 
thirds of the members present. 

Judgment in Case of Conviction. Judgment in cases of impeachment shall 
not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold 
and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States ; but the 
party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, 
judgment, and punishment, according to law. 

Section 4. Both Houses 

Manner of electing Members. The times, places, and manner of holding elec- 
tions for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each State by 
the Legislature thereof ; but the Congress may at any time, by law, make or 
alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.^ 

Meetings of Congress. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every 
year, and such meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they 
shall by law appoint a different day. 

Section 5. The Houses separately 

Organization. Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns, and 
qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a 
quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, 
and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such 
manner, and under such penalties, as each house may provide. 

Rules. Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its 
members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, 
expel a member. 

Journal. Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to 
time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require 
secrecy, and the yeas and nays of the members of either house on any question 
shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal. 

Adjournment. Neither house, during the session of Congress, shall, without 
the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other 
place than that in which the two houses shall be sitting. 

Section 6. Privileges and Disabilities of Members 

t 

Pay and Privileges of Members. The senators and representatives shall 
receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid 
out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except 
treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their 

1 This is to prevent Congress from fixing the places of meeting of the state legislatures. 



viii APPENDIX II 

attendance at the ses'sion of their respective houses, and in going to and 
returning from the same ; and for any speech or debate in either house, they 
shall not be questioned in any other place. 

Prohibitions on Members, No senator or representative shall, during the 
time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the au- 
thority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments 
whereof shall have been increased, during such time; and no person holding 
any office under the United States shall be a member of either house during 
his continuance in office. 

Section 7. Method of passing Laws 

Revenue Bills. All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of 
Representatives ; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as 
on other bills. 

How Bills become Laws. Every bill which shall have passed the House of 
Representatives and the Senate shall, before it become a law, be presented 
to the President of the United States ; if he approve, he shall sign it, but if 
not, he shall return it, with his objections, to that house in which it shall have 
originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and pro- 
ceed to reconsider it. If after such reconsideration, two-thirds of that house 
shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the 
other house, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by 
two-thirds of that house, it shall become a law. But in all such cases the votes 
of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the 
persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal-of each 
house respectively. If any bill shall not be returned by the President within 
ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the 
same shall be a law, in Hke manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress 
by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law. 

Resolutions, etc. Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence 
of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a 
question of adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United 
States ; and before the same shall take effect, shall be approved by him, or 
being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two-thirds of the Senate and 
House of Representatives, according to the rules and limitations prescribed 
in the case of a bill. 

I. 
Section 8. Powers granted to Congress 

Powers of Congress. The Congress shall have power : 

To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and 
provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States ; but 
all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES ix 

To borrow money on the credit of the United States ; 

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, 
and with the Indian tribes ; 

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the 
subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; 

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the 
standard of weights and measures ; 

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current 
coin of the United States ; 

To establish post-offices and post-roads ; 

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing, for limited 
times, to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings 
and discoveries ; 

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court ; 

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, 
and offenses against the law of nations ; 

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, ^ and make rules con- 
cerning captures on land and water; 

To raise and support armies, but no appropriatiftn of money to that use 
shall be for a longer term than two years ; 

To provide and maintain a navy; 

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval 
forces ; 

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, 
suppress insurrections and repel invasions ; 

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for gov- 
erning such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United 
States, reserving to the States respectively the appointment of the officers, 
and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed 
by Congress ; 

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such district 
(not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular States, and 
the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United 
States,- and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the con- 
sent of the Legislature of the State in which the same shall .be, for the erection 
of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings ; — And 

Implied Powers. To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for 
carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by 
this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department 
or officer thereof.'^ 

1 Letters granted by the government to private citizens in time of war, authorizing 
them, under certain conditions, to capture the ships of the enemy. 

2 The District of Columbia. 

3 This is the famous elastic clause of the Constitution. 



X APPENDIX II 

Section 9. Powers forbidden to the United States 

Absolute Prohibitions on Congress. The migration or importation of such 
persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall 
not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hun- 
dred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not 
exceeding ten dollars for each person.^ 

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus ^ shall not be suspended, unless 
when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. 

No bill of attainder 3 or ex-post-facto law* shall be passed. 

No capitation or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the 
census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken. [Extended by 
Amendment XVI.] 

No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State. 

No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to 
the ports of one State over those of another ; nor shall vessels bound to, or 
from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties in another. 

No money shall be drawn from the treasury but in consequence of appro- 
priations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts 
and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time. 

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States : And no person 
holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of 
the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind 
whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state. 

Section 10. Powers forbidden to the States 

Absolute Prohibitions on the States. No State shall enter into any treaty, 
alliance, or confederation ; grant letters of marque and reprisal ; coin money ; 
emit bills of credit ; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in pay- 
ment of debts ; pass any bill of attainder, ex-post-facto law, or law impairing 
the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility. 

Conditional Prohibitions on the States. No State shall, without the consent 
of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what 
may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws ; and the net 
produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any State on imports or exports, 

iThis refers to the foreign slave trade. "Persons" means "slaves." In iSo8 
Congress prohibited the importation of slaves. This clause is, of course, no longer 

in force. . . . , 

2 An official document requiring an accused person who is in prison awaiting trial to 
be brought into court to inquire whether he may be legally held. 

3 A special legislative act by which a person may be condemned to death or to out- 
lawry or banishment without the opportunity of defending himself which he would have 

in a court of law. , 

4 A law relating to the punishment of acts committed before the law was passed. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xi 

shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States ; and all such laws 
shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress. 

No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, 
keep troops, or ships-of-war, in time of peace, enter into any agreement or 
compact with another State, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless 
actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay. 



ARTICLE II. EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT 
Section i. President and Vice-President 

Term. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United 
States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and. 
together with the Vice-President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as 
follows : 

Electors. Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof 
may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and 
representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress : but no 
senator or representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under 
the United States, shall be appointed an elector. 

Proceedings of Electors and of Congress. [^ The electors shall meet in their 
respective States, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least 
shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall 
make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; 
which list they shall sign and certify and transmit sealed to the seat of the 
government of flie United States, directed to the president of the Senate. 
The president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House 
of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be 
counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the Presi- 
dent, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed ; 
and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal 
number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose 
by ballot one of them for President ; and if no person have a majority, then 
from the five highest on the list the said house shall, in like manner, choose 
the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by 
States, the representation from each State having one vote ; a quorum for 
this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the 
States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. In 
every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest 
number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice-President. But if there 
should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose 
from them by ballot the Vice-President.] 

1 This paragraph in brackets has been superseded by the Twelfth Amendment. 



Xli APPENDIX II 

Time of choosing Electors. The Congress may determine the time of choos- 
ing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes ; which day 
shall be the same throughout the United States. ^ 

Qualifications of President. No person except a natural born citizen, or a 
citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, 
shall be eligible to the office of President ; neither shall any person be eligible 
to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and 
been fourteen years resident within the United States. 

Vacancy. In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his 
death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said 
office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President, and the Congress may 
by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inabilij;y, both 
of the President and Vice-President, declaring what officer shall then act as 
President ; and such officer shall act accordingly until the disability be 
removed, or a President shall be elected.^ 

Salary. The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services a com- 
pensation which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period 
for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that 
period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them. 

Oath. Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the 
following oath or affirmation: — " I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will 
faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the 
best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United 
States." 

Section 2. Powers of the President 

Military Powers ; Reprieves and Pardons. The President shall be commander- 
in-chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the 
several States, when called into the actual service of the United States ; he 
may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the ex- 
ecutive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective 
offices ; and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses 
against the United States, except in cases of impeachment. 

Treaties; Appointments. He shall have power, by and with the advice and 
consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators 
present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and con- 
sent of the Senate shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and 
consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United 

1 The electors are chosen on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, 
preceding the expiration of a presidential term. They vote (by Act of Congress of Feb- 
ruary 3, 1SS7) on the second Monday in January for President and Vice-President. 
The votes are counted, and declared in Congress on the second Wednesday of the 
following February. 

2 This has now been provided for by the Presidential Succession Act of i8S6. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xiii 

States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which 
shall be established by law : but the Congress may by law vest the appoint- 
ment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in 
the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. 

Filling of Vacancies. The President shall have tjower to fill up all vacancies 
that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions 
which shall expire at the end of their next session. 

Section 3. Duties of the President 

Message ; Convening of Congress. He shall from time to time give to the 
Congress information ^ of the state of the Union, and recommend to their con- 
sideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient ; he may, 
on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses, or either of them, and in 
case of disagreement between them with respect to the time of adjournment, 
he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive 
ambassadors and other public ministers ; he shall take care that the laws be 
faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States. 

Section 4. Impeachment 

Removal of Officers. The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of 
the United States, shall be removed from office on 'impeachment for, and 
conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. 

ARTICLE III. JUDICIAL DEPARTMENT 
Section i. United States Courts 

Courts established ; Judges. The judicial power of the United States shall 
be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress 
may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the Supreme 
and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior, and shall, at 
stated times, receive for their services a compensation which shall not be 
diminished during their continuance in office. 

Section 2. Jurisdiction of United States Courts 

Federal Courts in General. The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in 
law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, 
and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority ; — to all cases 

' The president gives this information through a message to Congress at the open- 
ing of each session. Washington and John Adams read their messages in person to 
Congress. Jefferson, however, sent a written message to Congress. This method was 
followed until President Wilson returned to the earlier custom. 



xiv APPENDIX II 

affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls ; — to all cases of 
admiralty and maritime jurisdiction ; — to controversies to which the United 
States shall be a party; — to controversies between two or more States; — 
between a State and citizens of another State ; i — between citizens of different 
States; — between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of 
different States, and between a State, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, 
citizens or subjects. 

Supreme Court. In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers 
and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party, the Supreme Court 
shall have original jurisdiction. In all other cases before mentioned, the 
Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with 
such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. 

Trials. The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by 
jury ; and such trial shall be held in the State where the said crimes shall have 
been committed ; but when not committed within any State, the trial shall be 
at such place or places as the Congress may by law have directed. 

Section 3. Treason 

Treason defined. Treason against the United States shall consist only in 
levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid 
and comfort. 

No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two 
witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. 

Punishment. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of 
treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, 
except during the life of the person attainted. 

ARTICLE IV. RELATIONS OF THE STATES TO EACH OTHER 

Section i. Official Acts 

Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts, records, 
and judicial proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by gen- 
eral laws, prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings 
shall be proved, and the effect thereof. 

Section 2. Privileges of Citizens 

The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities 
of citizens in the several States. 

Fugitives from Justice. A person charged in any State with treason, felony, 
or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another State, 

1 This has been modified by the Eleventh Amendment 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xv 

shall, on demand of the executive authority of the State from which he 
fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of 
the crime. 

Fugitive Slaves. No person ^ held to service or labor in one State, under 
the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or 
regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be 
delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. 



Section 3. New States and Territories 

Admission of States. New States maybe admitted by the Congress into this 
Union ; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction 
of any other State ; nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more 
States, or parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the 
States concerned as well as of the Congress. 

Territory and Property of United States. The Congress shall have power to 
dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory 
or other property belonging to the United States ; and nothing in this Con- 
stitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, 
or of any particular State. 



Section 4. Protection of the States 

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican 
form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion, and on 
application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature 
cannot be convened) against domestic violence. 



ARTICLE V. AMENDMENTS 

How proposed; how ratified. The Congress, whenever two-thirds of»both 
houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitu- 
tion, or, on the application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several 
States, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either 
case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, 
when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, or by 
conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratifica- 
tion may be proposed by the Congress ; provided that no amendment which 

1 " Person " here includes slave. This was the basis of the Fugitive Slave Laws of 
1793 and 1850. It is now superseded by the Thirteenth Amendment, by which slavery 
is prohibited. 



xvi APPENDIX II 

may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in 
any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first 
article ; and that no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal 
suffrage in the Senate. 

ARTICLE VI. GENERAL PROVISIONS 

Public Debt. All debts contracted, and engagements entered into, before 
the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States 
under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. 

Supremacy of Constitution. This Constitution, and the laws of the United 
States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ; and all treaties made, or 
which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the 
supreme law of the land ; and the judges in every State shall be bound 
thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary 
notwithstanding. 

Official Oath ; Religious Test. The senators and representatives before men- 
tioned, and the members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive 
and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall 
be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution ; but no religious 
test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under 
the United States. 

ARTICLE VII. RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION 

Ratification. The ratification of the Conventions of nine States shall be 
sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so 
ratifying the same. 

Done in convention, by the unanimous consent of the States present, the 
seventeenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand 
seven hundred and eighty-seven, and of the independence of the 
United States of America the tv/elfth. 

In witness whereof, we have hereunto subscribed our names.i 

GEORGE WASHINGTON, 
President, a)id Deputy from Virginia. 

1 There were sixty-five delegates chosen to the convention : ten did not attend ; six- 
teen declined or failed to sign ; thirty-nine signed. Rhode Island sent no delegates. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xvil 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 

John Langdon 
Nicholas Oilman 

MASSACHUSETTS 

Nathaniel Gorham 
RuFus King 

CONNECTICUT 

William Samuel Johnson 
/Roger Sherman 

NEW YORK 
Alexander Hamilton 

NEW JERSEY 

William Livingston 
David Brearley 
William Paterson 
Jonathan Dayton 



PENNSYLVANIA 

Benjamin Franklin 
Thomas Mifflin 
Robert Morris 
George Clymer 

T^HOMAS FiTZSIMONS 

Jared Lngersoll 
James Wilson 

GoXrVERNEUR MORRIS 



VIRGINIA 

John Blair 
James Madison, Jr. 



NORTH CAROLINA 

William Blount 
Richard Dobbs Spaight 
Hugh Williamson 



DELAWARE 
George Read 
Gunning Bedford, Jr. 
John Dickinson 
Richard Bassett 
Jacob Broom 

MARYLAND 
James M'Henry 
Daniel of St. Thomas 

Jenifer William Few 

Daniel Carroll Abraham Baldwin 

Attest: WILLIAM 'SKQ.V.^,0^, Secretary 



SOUTH CAROLINA 

John Rutledge 
Charles C. Pincknev 
Charles Pinckney 
Pierce Butler 



GEORGIA 



AMENDMENTS 

Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition. Article I.^ Congress shall 
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free 
exercise thereof ; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ; or the 
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for 
redress of grievances. 

Militia. Article H. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security 
of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be 
infringed. 

Soldiers. Article III. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in 
any house, without the consent of the owner; nor in time of war but in a 
manner to be prescribed by law. 

Unreasonable Searches. Article IV. The right of the people to be secure 
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches 
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon 

1 These amendments were proposed by Congress and ratified by the legislatures of 
the several states, pursuant to the fifth article of the Constitution. The first ten were 
offered in 1789 and adopted before the close of 1701. They were for the most part the 
work of Madison. They are frequently called the Bill of Rights, as their purpose is to 
guard more efficiently the rights of the people and of the states. 



xviii APPENDIX II 

probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing 
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

Criminal Prosecutions. Article V. No person shall be held to answer for 
a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment 
of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the 
militia, when in actual service in time of war and public danger ; nor shall any 
person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or 
limb ; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against him- 
self, nor to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ; 
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. 

Article VI. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the 
right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district 
wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been 
previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of 
the accusation ; to be confronted with the witnesses against him ; to have 
compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the 
assistance of counsel for his defense. 

Suits at Common Law. Article VII. In suits at common law, where the 
value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall 
be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any 
court of the United States than according to the rules of common law. 

Bail, Punishments. Article VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, 
nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. 

Reserved Rights and Powers. Article IX. The enumeration in the Con- 
stitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others 
retained by the people. 

Article X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Consti- 
tution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respec- 
tively, or to the people. 

Suits against States. Article XI.^ The judicial power of the United 
States shaJl not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced 
or prosecuted against any of the United States by citizens of another State, or 
by citizens or subjects of any foreign state. 

Method of electing President and Vice-President. Article XII.^ The electors 
shall meet in their respective States, and vote by ballot for President and 
Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same 
State with themselves ; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for 
as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President ; 
and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of 
all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each- 
which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the 
government of the United States, directed to the president of the Senate ; — 

1 Proposed in 1794 ; adopted in 1798. 3 Adopted in 1804. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xix 

the president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of 
Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted ; 
— the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the 
President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors 
appointed ; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having 
the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as 
President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, 
the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by 
States, the representation from each State having one vote ; a quorum for 
this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the 
States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. And if the 
House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of 
choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, 
then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or 
other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest 
number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number 
be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed ; and if no person have 
a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall 
choose the Vice-President ; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds 
of the whole number of senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be 
necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office 
of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States. 

Slavery abolished. Article XHI.^ Seciloft i. Neither slavery nor involun- 
tary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall 
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place 
subject to their jurisdiction. 

' Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate 
legislation. 

Negroes made Citizens. Article XIV.^ Section i. All persons born or 
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are 
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State 
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immuni- 
ties of citizens of the United States ; nor shall any State deprive any person 
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person 
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States 
according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons 
in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any 
election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the 
United States, representatives in Congress, the executive or judicial officers 
of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the 
male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of 

1 Adopted in 1865. s Adopted in 1S68. . 



XX APPENDIX II 

the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebel- 
lion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the 
proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole 
number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. 

Section j. No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or 
elector of President or Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, 
under the United States, or under any State, who having previously taken an 
oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a 
member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any 
State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in 
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the 
enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, 
remove such disability. 

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized 
by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for 
services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. 
But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or 
obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United 
States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave ; but all such 
debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void. 

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legis- 
lation, the provisions of this article. 

Negroes made Voters. Article XV.^ Section i. The rights of citizens of the 
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or 
by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appro- 
priate legislation. 

Income Tax. Article XVI.2 The Congress shall have power to lay and col- 
lect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived, without apportionment 
among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. 

Article XVII.^ The Senate of the United States shall be composed of 
two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof for six years ; 
and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have 
the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the 
State Legislatures. 

Direct Election of Senators. When vacancies happen in the representation 
of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue 
writs of election to fill such vacancies : Provided, that the Legislature of any 
State may empower the Executive thereof to make temporary appointments 
until the people fill the vacancies by election as the Legislature may direct. 

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term 
of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution. 

1 Adopted in 1870. 2 Ratified in 1913. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES xxi 

National Prohibition. Article XVIII. i Section i. After one year from the 
ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicat- 
ing liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof 
from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for 
beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. 

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power 
to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. 

Section J. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified 
as an amendment to the Constitution by the Legislatures of the several States, 
as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the sub- 
mission hereof to the States by the Congress. 

Woman Suffrage. Article XIX.2 Section i. The right of citizens of the 
United States to vote shall mot be denied or abridged by the United States 
or by any State on account of sex. 

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate 
legislation. 

1 Ratified in 1919. In force in 1920. 

2 Ratified in 1920. 



xxu 



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XXIV 



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APPENDIX IV 



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MEMBERS OF CABINET AND SUPREME COURT xxvii 



MEMBERS OF CABINET AND SUPREME COURT UNDER 
ROOSEVELT, TAFT, AND WILSON, 1901-1920 



Roosevelt, 1901-1909 



Taft, 1909-1913 



Wilson, 1913-1921 



Secretaries of State 



[1898] John Hay 
1905 Elihu Root 
1909 Robert Bacon 



1909 P. C. Knox 



191 3 William J. Bryan 
191 5 Robert Lansing 
1920 Bainbridge Colby 



Secretaries of the Treasury 



[1S97] Lyman J. Gage 


1909 Franklin McVeagh 


1913 William G. McAdoo 


1902 Leslie M. Shaw 




1918 Carter Glass 


1907 G. B. Cortelyou 




1920 D. F. Houston 



Secretaries of War 



[1899] Elihu Root 


1909 J. M. Dickinson 


1913 L. M. Garrison 


1904 William H. Taft 


191 1 H. L. Stimson 


191 6 Newton D. Baker 


1908 Luke E. Wright 







A ttorn eys- Gen era I 



[1901] P. C. Knox 
1904 W. H. Moody 
1906 C. J. Bonaparte 



1909 G. W. Wickersham 



1913 J. C. McReynolds 

19 14 T. B. Gregory 
1919 A. M. Palmer 



Secretaries of the Navy 



[1897] John D. Long 
1902 W. H. Moody 

1904 Paul Morton 

1905 C. J. Bonaparte 

1906 V. H. Metcalf 
1908 T. H. Newberry 



1909 G. von L. Meyer 



1913 Josephus Daniels 



Postmasters- General 



1901 Henry C. Payne 

1904 R. J. Wynne 

1905 G. B. Cortelyou 
1907 G. von L. Meyer 



1909 Frank H. Hitchcock 



191 3 A. S. Burleson 



Secretaries of the interior 



[1899] E. A. Hitchcock 
1907 James R. Garfield 



1909 R. A. Ballinger 
191 1 W. L. Fisher 



19 13 Franklin K. Lane 
1920 John B. Payne 



XXVlll 



APPENDIX IV 



MEMBERS OF CABINET AND SUPREME COURT (Continued) 



Roosevelt, 1901-1909 


Taft, 1909-1913 


Wilson, 1913-1921 




Secretaries of Agric_filtu7-e 




[1897] James Wilson 


[1897] James Wilson 


1913 D. F. Houston 
1920 E. T. Meredith 


Secretaries of Commerce and Labor 



1903 G. B. Cortelyou 

1904 V. H. Metcalf 
1906 Oscar Straus 



1909 Charles Nagel 



Secretaries of Commerce 



1913 William C. Redfield 
1919 J. W. Alexander 



Secretaries of Labor 



1913 William B. Wilson 



fusiices of the Supi-eme Court 



1877-1^11 J.M.Harlan 




Harlan 


Pitney 


1881-1902 Horace Gray 




Holmes 


Holmes 


1888-1010 M. W. Fuller 




Fuller 


Hughes 


1889-1910 D. J. Brewer 




Brewer 


Lamar 


1890-1906 H. B. Brown 




Moody 


Van Devanter 


1892-1902 G. Shiras, Jr. 




Day 


Day 


1894 Edward D. White 




White 1 


White 


1895-1909 R.W. Peckham 




Peckham 


Lurton 


1898 James McKenna 




McKenna 


McKenna 


1902 0. W. Holmes 2 


1909- 


-1914 H. H. Lurton^ 


1914 J. C. McReynoldsio 


1903 William R. Day^ 


1910- 


-1916 C. E. Hughes^ 


1916 Louis D. Brandeis ^^ 


1907-1910 W.R.Moody* 


igio-1916 J. R. Lamar'' 


1916 John H. Clarke 12 




1910 


W. Van DevanterS 






1912 


Mahlon Pitney ^ 





1 Succeeded Fuller as Chief Justice. 

2 To replace Gray. 

3 To replace Shiras. 
* To replace Brown. 



5 To replace Peckham. 

6 To replace Fuller. 

' To replace Brewer, 
s To replace Moody. 



9 To replace Harlan. 
1" To replace Lurton. 

11 To replace Lamar. 

12 To replace Hughes. 



PRESIDENT HARDING'S CABINET xxix 

PRESIDENT HARDING'S CABINET, MARCH, 1921 

Secretary of State 
Charles Evans Hughes of New York 

Secretary of the Treasiny 
Andrew W. Mellon of Pennsylvania 

Secretary of War 
John W. Weeks of Massachusetts 

Attorney Geiieral 

Harrj' M. Daugherty of Ohio 

« 

Postmaster General 
Will H. Hays of Indiana 

Secretary of the N'avy 
Edwin Denby of Michigan 

Secretary of the Interior 
Albert B. Fall of New Mexico 

Secretary of Agriculture 
Henry C. Wallace of Iowa 

Secretary of Commerce 
Herbert C. Hoover of California 

Secretafy of Labor 
James J. Davis of Indiana 



INDEX 



ABC powers, 494 

Abolitionists, 255 f.; and South, 258!.; 
and Congress, 259 f.; and mails, 
260 f.; and Kansas, 304 f., 308 f.; 
sectional, 318; in i860, 339 and n. 2 

Abraham, Plains of, 87 f. 

Acadia, 77, 79 

Adams, Abigail, 174 

Adams, Charles Francis, 394 f . 

Adams, John, on Otis, 95 n.; in Con- 
tinental Congress, 103; "independ- 
ency," iii; and Declaration of 
Independence, 114; on peace com- 
mission, 127; minister to England, 
129, 142; a Federalist, 162; vice 
president, 167; and X Y Z affair, 
170; war with France, 171; appoints 
"midnight judges," 173; appoints 
John Marshall, 198; ideal of gov- 
ernment, 217 

Adams, John Quincy, in election of 
1820, 201; Secretary of State, 204 f.; 
character, 210 f.; in election of 1824, 
215 f.; as president, 218 f.; signs 
tariff of 1828, 224; opinion on Mis- 
souri Compromise, 253; and gag 
resolution, 260; at Ghent, 260 n.i; 
tries to buy Texas, 270; compared 
with Hayes, 405 

Adams, Samuel, on resistance to rulers, 
94; writes circular letter, 99; defies 
Governor Hutchinson, 100; in Con- 
tinental Congress, 103; proscribed 
by King George, 105 ; opposes Con- 
stitution, 142, 146 

Adamson Act, 502 n. 

Aguinaldo, 456 f. 

Air service, 514 

Alabama, 194 

Alabama claims, 395, 39611.1 

Alamance, 113 n. 

Alamo, 268 f. 

Alaska, 201, 206, 396 f., 434, 463, 491 

Albany, 48, 117 

Albany plan of union, 82 f. 



Aldrich, Nelson W., 4S1 

Aldrich-Vreeland Act, 48S 

Alexander H, Czar, 396 

Alexander VI, Pope, 8 

Alexander, J. W., 524 n. 

Alexandria, 382 

Alger, Secretary, 455 n. 

Algonquins, 71 

Alien and Sedition Acts, 171 f., 175 

Alien Property Custodian, 524 and n. i 

Allen, Ethan, no 

Allenby, General, 522 n. 

Allied War Council, 522 f. 

Allison, Senator, 407 

Altgeld, Governor, 442 

Amendments: I-X, 152; XII, i5on., 
216; XIII, 378 f., 383; XIV, 38S 
and n.3, 386 and n. i, 387; XV, 
389 n.; XVI, 152; XVII, 152; 
XVIII, 152, 533 ; XIX, 153 

Amendments, Crittenden, 329 

America, name, 17 

American Army in France, 520 f. 

American Association, 103 f. 

American Expeditionary Force 
(A.E.F.), 513 

American Federation of Labor, 436, 

533 
American Policy, 219 f., 220 n. 
American Revplution, 45, 90 f., 116 f. 
American System, 241, 421 
Americanization, 505, 535 
Amerigo Vespucci, 10 
Amherst, General, 87 f. 
Anaconda policy, 362 
Anderson, Robert, 331 f., 373 
Andre, Major, 122 
Andros, Edmund, 43 f . 
Anglican Church, 93 f. 
Annapolis, convention at, 141 f. 
Anne, Queen, 247 
Antietam, 354, 376 
Anti-imperialism, 458 f . 
Antimasons, 240 
Anti-Nebraska men, 307 



XXXI 



XXXll 



INDEX 



Antislavery societies, 255, 25911. 

Apia, 434 

"Appeal of the Independent Demo- 
crats," 302 

Appomattox, 370 

Aragon, 15 

Argonne Forest, 521!. 

Aristotle, 5 n. 

Arizona, 398, 431 n. i 

Arkansas, 260 n. 3 

Armada, 15 

Armistice, 522 f. 

Army, American, 512 f. 

Arnold, Benedict, 112, 118, 122 and n., 
302 

Arthur, Chester A., 405, 413 

Articles of Confederation, 136 f., 227 

Ashburton, Lord, 271 

Ashley River, 47 

Assistants, 38 

Assumption, policy of, 160 f. 

Astor, John Jacob, 266 

Astoria, 266 

Atkinson, Edward, 459 n. 2 

Atlanta, 365 f., 368 

Austerlitz, battle of, 180 

Australia, 107 

Aztecs, 13, 19 

Babcock, 0. E., 393 
. Bacon, Nathaniel, 33 
Bacon, Roger, 5 n. 
Bahamas, 5 f . 

Bainbridge, Commodore, 179 
Baker, Newton D., 486 n., 502 
Balboa, 12 n., 13 
Balfour, A. J., 512 
Ballinger, R. A., 481 
Balmaceda, 435 
Baltimore, Lord, 54 
Baltimore, Md., 45, 53, 186 f., 323, 

336 
Bank, National (first), 161 f., (second) 

197 f., 231 f. 
Barbados, 91 f. 
Barbary States, 138 
Bates, Edwin, 324 
Bay Psalm Book, 66 
Beauregard, General P. G. T., 333, 347 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 334 
Belgian Relief Commission, 515 
Belgium, invasion of, 497, 498 n. 
Belknap, Secretary, 393 
Bell, John, 324 f. 



Bellamy, Edward, 423 n. i 

Belleau Wood, 520 

Bellomont, Earl of, 62, 81 

Benson, Allan, 506, SiSn. 

Benton, Thomas Hart, 213 f., 218, 234, 
266 f. 

Bering Sea, 434 

Berkeley, Lord, 52 

Berkeley, Sir William, 33 

Berlin decree, 180 

Bethmann-Hollweg, von, 498 n. 

Beveridge, Albert J., 480 

Biddle, Nicholas, 233 

" Big Business," 480 f. 

Bill of Rights, 152 

Bimetallism, 448 

Binney, Horace, 262 

Birney, James G., 261, 274, 330 n. 

Bismarck, Otto von, 434 

Black, Jeremiah, 329 

Black codes, 383 t. 

Black Republicans, 322, 342 

Black Warrior affair, 298 

Eladensburg, 186 

Blaine, James G., 400 and n. ; in cam- 
paign of 1880, 40S; Secretary of 
State, 410, 412, 427 f.; nominated 
for presidency in 1884, 413 ; and 
Cleveland, 413 f . ; Pan-American 
policy, 433, 476; and campaign of 
1S88, 426 and n. 2 ; resignation and 
death, 435; character, 43S f. 

Bland, Richard P., 446 

Bland-Allison Act, 406 f. 

"Bleeding Kansas," 310 f. 

Bliss, General T. H., 525 

Blockade, in Civil War, 349 ; in World 
War, 498 

Bolshevists, 520 n., 532 

Bond transactions of 1S9S, 438, 439 n. 

Bonhomme Richard, 119 

Bonus Bill, 196 f. 

Boone, Daniel, 124, 155 

Booth, J. Wilkes, 373 

Borah, Senator William E., 527 

Border ruffians, 309 

Boston, settlement, 37 f.; migration, 
40; Andros in, 44; News Letter, 66; 
punishment of, 102 f.; Continental 
army around, no; evacuation of, 

IIS 
Boston Massacre, 100 f. 
Boston Tea Party, 100 f. 
"Boxer" rebellion, 462 



INDEX 



XXXIU 



Boy-Ed, Captain, 501 

Braddock's defeat, 84, 86, T17 

Bradford, Governor William, 35 f. 

Bragg, General Braxton, 301 f. 

Brandywine, battle of, iiS 

Breckinridge, John €., 323, 325 

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 520 n. 

Bristow, Secretary Benjamin H., 480 

Brooklyn Heights, battle of, 116 

Brooks, Preston, 311 and n. 

Brougham, Lord, 221 

Brown, General Jacob, 1S6 

Brown, John, 310, 321, 3220. 

Brown University, 65 

Bryan, William J., in campaign of 
1896, 446 f.; of 1900, 458; of 1908, 
479; of 191 2, 484; Secretary of 
State, 486, 402; resignation, 486 n.; 
and preparedness, 502 

Bryant, William C., 200 

Buchanan, James, and Ostend Mani- 
festo, 29S; and South, 303 n.; elec- 
tion to presidency, 312; and Le- 
compton Constitution, 315; in i860, 
328 f. ; and forts at Charleston, 332 f . 

Buell, General Don Carlos, 352, 361 

Buena Vista, battle of, 277 

Buford, 532 

Bulgaria, 522 n. 

Bull Run, battle of (first), 347, 
(second) 354 

Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton, 297 

Bunau-Varilla, 475 

Bunker Hill, battle of, iii 

Burchard, Reverend S. D., 414 n. 2 

Bureau of Labor, 424 

Burgesses, House of, 31 

Burgoyne, General John, 116 f. 

Burke, Edmund, 91, 105, 107, 403 

Burleson, Secretary A. S., 4S6 

Burlingame, Anson, 405 n. i 

Burnet, Governor, 81 

Burns, Anthony, 305 

Burnside, General Ambrose E., 354 

Burr, Aaron, 172 f., 179 

Bustamante, President of Mexico, 268 

Bute, Lord, 107 

Butler, Senator A. P., 311 

Butler, General Benj. F., 353, 393, 398 

Cabeza de Vaca, 14 
Cabinet, 149 and n. 
Cabot, John, 8 f ., 18, 28, 70 
Cahokia, 126 



Calhoun, John C, and Bonus Bill, 
196; Secretary of War, 204; char- 
acter, 213 ; " Exposition and Protest," 
224; and Union, 230; and Missouri 
Compromise, 254; and abolition, 
259; and slavery demands, 260 f.; 
and Texan treaty, 272 f.; on Com- 
promise of 1850, 289 

Calhoun-Davis theory, 284 and n. 

California, 276 f., 279, 2S6f., 291 

Calvert, Cecil, 46 

Calvert, George, 43 

Camden, battle of, 120 

Cameron, Simon, 324 

Canada, 94, 107, 482 n. 

Canal, see Panama 

Canning, George, 206 

Cannon, Joseph G., 428 n., 482 

Cantigny, 519 f. 

Cape Cod, 34 f. 

Caporetto, 522 n. 

Caribbean, our interest in, 502 f. 

Carnegie, Andrew, 426 n. 2, 47S and n, 

Carolinas, 47 f., 80, 120 

"Carpetbaggers," 3S4n. 

Carranza, President of Mexico, 493, 

405 

Carteret, 52 

Cartier, Jacques, 18, 71 f. 

Cass, Lewis, 284 f., 292 

Castile, !■? 

Catha}', 6 f., 13, 19 

Caucus, 1500.2, 215 n. 

Cavaliers, 32 

Cavendish, Thomas, 18 

Cavite, battle of, 453 

Cecil, Lord, 19 

Celeron de Bienville, 81 f. 

Census, of i860, 330; of 1880, 404; of 
1890, 429 

Centennial Exposition of 1876, 402 

Cervera, Admiral, 454, 456 

Champlain, battle of Lake, 186 

Champlain, Samuel de, 71, 74, 77 

Chancellorsville, battle of, 354 and n. 2 

Chapultepec, storming of, 27S 

Charles I, of England, 32, 36, 38 f. 

Charles II, of England, 40, 42 f., 
45 n. 2, 48 f., 53, 57 f., 92 

Charles V, Emperor, 15 

Charleston, S. C, settlement, 47 ; courts^ 
64 n.; tea at, loi ; captured by Brit- 
ish, 120; and nullification, 231; and 
abolition, 260; convention of i86o> 



XXXIV 



INDEX 



323; convention of secession, 326; 
forts in harbor, 332 f.; celebration 
at, 1865, 373 

Charlestown, iii 

Chase, Salmon P., on Compromise of 
1850, 290; on Kansas, 302; in cam- 
paign of i860, 324; Secretary of 
Treasury, 332 n. 2 ; finances Civil 
War, 359; aspirant for presidency, 
366 f.; and Lincoln, 367 n. i ; Chief 
Justice, 367 n. I ; at Johnson trial, 
392 ; and national banks, 398 

Chateau-Thierry, 520 

Chatham, Earl, see Pitt 

Chattanooga,battleof,36i f.,363 andn. 

Chesapeake affair, 182 

Chickamauga, battle of, 362 f. 

Child Labor Law, 562 n. 

Chile, 14, 435 

China, 18, 76; treaty with, 405 and n.; 
relations with, 462 f.; six-power 
loan, 504 n. 

Chinese laborers, 296 

Choate, Rufus, 292 

Chowan River, 47 

Cibola, cities of, 14 

Cincinnati, 196 

Circular letter of Massachusetts, 99 f . 

Civil Rights bill, 385 notes 2, 3 

Civil Service, reform, 410 f.; league, 
411 ; Commission, 466 and n.; under 
Taft and Roosevelt, 482 

Civil War, 344 f-; in West, 350 f.; 
financing, 355, 359 f-; political ef- 
fects, 390 f.; economic results, 398 

Claiborne, William, 46 

Claiborne, W. C. C, 203 

Clark, Champ, 484 

Clark, George Rogers, 126 f., 136 

Clark, Jonas, 105 

Clay, Henry, and the "War Hawks," 
183 f.; and Spanish America, 205 f.; 
character, 214; in election of 1824, 
215 f.; and compromise tariff of 
1833, 231; and bank, 233; nomi- 
nated for presidency in 1832, 240; 
in election of 1844, 273; on Texas, 
273; and Omnibus Bill, 287 f.; the 
"great pacificator," 292 ; death, 294 
n. I ; compared with Blaine, 400 n. 

Clayton Act of 1914, 490 

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 297 

Cleveland, Grover, career, 413 f . ; 
elected president, 414 and n.; as 



president, 418 f.; and Senate, 418 f.; 
and surplus, 420 f.; and tariff, 421 f. ; 
and labor, 423 f.; defeated in 1888, 
426; vetoes pension bills, 426; re- 
elected in 1892, 436; problems of 
second term, 437 f.; repeal of Sher- 
man Silver Act, 438; bond transac- 
tions, 439 n.; and Chicago strike, 
441 f . ; and Hawaii, 443 ; repudiated 
by Democrats in 1896, 44Sf.; and 
Roosevelt, 466 n. 

Clinton, De Witt, 212 

Clinton, General Sir Henry, 116, 120, 
122 

Coahuila, 268 

Coal strike of 1902, 469; of 1919, 53i 

Cockburn, Lord, 396 

Colbert, 77 f. 

Colby, Bainbridge, 524 n. 

Cold Harbor, battle of, 365 and n. 2 

Colfax, Schuyler, 399 

Colombia, 474 f. 

Colonial implements, 65 

Colonies, table of, 58; in i8th cen- 
tury, 56 f . ; relation to Parliament, 
92 f. ; signs of revolt, 94 

Colonization societies, 255 n. 

Colorado, mining, 403 

Columbia, S. C, convention at, 230 

Columbia College, 65 

Columbia River, 24 

Columbus, Christopher, 4 f. 

Columbus, N. Mex., raid on, 494 

"Commemoration Ode," 374 and n. 

Commerce, in Washington's Day, 
155 f.; after Civil War, 403; in 
World War, 487, 501 ; in 1919, 534 

Committees of Safety, 105 

"Common Sense," 113 

Compromise of 1850, 303, 308 

Concessions, New Jersey, 52 

Concord, Mass., 105 

Confederacy, Southern, 326, 335, 372 f. 

Conkling, Roscoe, 398, 405, 408, 410 
and n. 

Connecticut, 39 f-, 44; 56 

Conscientious objectors, 518 

Constitution, Confederate, 327 

Constitution, Federal, 143 f., 146 f ., 
227 

Constitutional Union Party, 324 f. 

Continental Congress (first), 103 f.j 
(second) 104 f., iiof., 128 

Contraband, slaves as, 374 f. 



INDEX 



XXXV 



Conventions, national nominating, 240 

Cooper, J. Fenimore, 200 f. 

Cooper, Thomas, 223 

Cooper Union, 322 f. 

"Copperheads," 384 

Corinth, 352 

Corn Islands, 503 

Cornell, Alonzo B., 405 

Cornstalk, Chief, 125 

Cornwallis, General, 117, 122 f., 135 

Coronado, 14 

Cortez, Hernando, 13 

Cost of World War, 522 

Cotton, John, 37 f. 

Cotton, cultivation of, 193 f.; produc- 
tion of, after War of 1812, 222; in 
1S50, 296; and South, 343; and Civil 
War, 349 

Cotton gin, 180, 194 n., 248 

Council for New England, 36, 38 

Coureiirs de bois, 73 

Cowpens, battle of, 120 

Cox, Gov. James M., 533 

Coxey's army, 440 f . 

Crawford, W. H., 198, 212 f., 215 f. 

Creasy, Sir Edward, 118 

Credit Mobilier, 398 f. 

"Crime of 1873," 406 n. 

"Crime against Kansas," 311 

"Critical Period" of American history, 

1.35 f. 

Srittenden, Senator J. J., 329 
romwell, Oliver, 127 

Crown Point, 81 

Cuba, discovery, 6; cultivation, 15; 
and Panama Congress, 219; desire 
of South for, 297 f.; insurrection in, 
451 f.; our intervention, 452; aban- 
doned by Spain, 457; organized as 
republic, 460 

Cuilom Act, 425 f. 

Cummins, Albert B., 480 

Cummins Bill, 529 

Cummins-Esch Bill, 529 f. 

Curtis, Geo. William, 393 n. i, 394, 413 

Custer, General Geo. A., 405 n. 2 

Czolgosz, 465 

Dakota, territory, 398 
Dale, Governor, 31 
Dallas, Secretary, 198 
Daniels, Josephus, 486, 502 
Danish West Indies, 503 
"Dark horse," 273 and n. 



Dartmouth College Case, 199 f., 211 

Davenport, John, 40 

Davis, Jefferson, on Oregon, 283 ; Sec- 
retary of War, 303 n. ; and Kansas, 
311; and Douglas, 318; and Pierce, 
320; Resolutions, 323; President of 
Confederacy, 327 ; and Lee, 336 n. i ; 
at Bull Run, 347 n.; discouragement 
of, 360; abandons Richmond, 370; 
imprisonment, 372 n.; release, 381 n. 

Davis, John, 18 

Dawes Bill, 430 

Day, William R., 463 n. i 

Dayton, William L., 312 

Debs, Eugene V., 441 f., 485 

Debt, of U. S., in Revolution, 128, 
138; in 1789, 160 f.; after World 
War, 534 

Debtors' prison, 239 n. 

Decatur, Stephen, 179 

Declaration of Independence, 113 f. 

De Grasse, Admiral Count, 122 

De Kalb, Baron, 120 n. 

Delaware, ratifies Constitution, 144 

De la Warre, Lord, 30 

De Lesseps, Ferdinand, 473 

De Lome, Seiior, 452 

Demarcation line, 8 

Democracy, Jacksonian, 218, 239 f. 

Democratic party, 240 and n., 241 ; 
split, 318, 323 f. 

Democratic-Republicans, 153 f. 

Deportations, 532 

De Soto, Hernando, 14 

De Tocqueville, Alexis, 146, 268 n., 339 

Detroit, 76, 81, 126, 181 

Dewey, Admiral George, 453 f ., 456 f ., 
462 n. 

Dias, Bartholomew, 4 

Dickinson, John, 64, 103, iii, 136, 
142, 144 

" Diedrich Knickerbocker," 49 f . 

Dieppe, 70 

Dingley Bill, 463 

Dinwiddle, Governor Robert, 82 f. 

District of Columbia, creation, i74n.; 
slave trade in, 288 

Dixie, 339 and n. 

" Dollar diplomacy," 504 and n. 

Dolliver, Senator, 480 

Domain, national, 137 

Donelson, Fort, 352 n. 

Dongan, Governor Thomas, 78 

Doniphan, Colonel A. W., 277 



XXXVl 



INDEX 



Dorchester, Lord, i66n. 

Douglas, Stephen A., and Compromise 
of 1850, 292; and Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill, 301 f.; mistake of, 30S; and 
campaign of 1S56, 312; and Le- 
compton, 315 f.; and Dred Scott 
case, 315; and Lincoln, 316; private 
fortune, 316 n. 2; and South, 318; 
and convention of i860, 323; in 
election of i860, 325; and Sumter, 

334 
Dover, N. H., 79 
Draft riots, 355 
Drake, Sir Francis, 18 
Drawbacks, 59 

Dred Scott case, 313 f., 320, 322 
Duke of York, 50, 77 
Duke's Laws, 50 
Dumba, Constantin, 501 
Dunning, William A., 393 
Duquesne, Fort, 83, 86 
Dustin, District Attorney, 419 
Dutch, on Hudson, 40, 48 

Early, General Jubal A., 368 

East India Company, loi f. 

Edmunds, George F., 413 

Education, in colonies, 65 f. 

Edward VII, funeral of, 479 

"Elastic clause," 153 

El Caney, battle of, 455 

Election, of 1796, 170; of 1800, 172 f. ; 
of 1804, 179; of 1812, 212; of 1816, 
189; of 1820, 201, 210; of 1824, 
2isf.; of 1828, 225; of 1832, 231, 
232 n. ; of 1836, 242 ; of 1840, 243 f . ; 
of 1844, 273; of 1848, 2S5; of 1852, 
294. 305, 307 n.; of 1856, 312 f.; 
of i860, 325; of 1864, 366 f.; of 
1868, 389 n.; of 1872, 394; of 1876, 
400 f.; of 1880, 409; of 1S84, 414; 
of 1888, 426 f.; of 1890, 433; of 
1892, 436 f.; of 1896, 448 f.; of 1900, 
458; of 1904, 476 f.; of 190S, 479; 
of 1910, 482; of 1912, 484 f.; of 
1916, 504 f-; of 1920, 534 

Electoral College, 150 

Electoral Commission, 401 

Elizabeth, Queen, 15, 18, 45 n. i 

Ellsworth, Oliver, 142 

Emancipation, process of, 378 

Emancipation Proclamation, 376!. 

" Embalmed beef," 455 n. 

Embargo Act, 182 



Emergency Fleet Corporation, 513 f., 

524 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 322 
Emery, Samuel, 62 
Endicott, John, 42 
English colonies in America, 26 f., 

67 f.; liberties, 90 f. 
Entail, 63 

Enumerated commodities, 59 
Episcopal Church, 44 
"Era of Good Feeling," 197 
Ericsson, Captain John, 350 
Erie Canal, 52, 212, 219 
Erskine, British minister, 182 
Erving, minister to Spain, 205 
Esch Bill, 529 
Esperey, General d', 522 n. 
Espionage Act, 518 
Ethnology, Bureau of, 22 
Everett, Edward, 303, 324, 334 
Executive department, 149 f. 
Expansion, to Pacific, 280 
Exploration, early English, 18 f.; 

French, 18, 57, 70 f., 75; Spanish, 

II f. 
Exploration, map of, in i6th century, 

23 
"Exposition and Protest," 224 

Fairbanks, Charles W., 505 

Fallen Timbers, battle of, 166 n. 

Falmouth, 112 

Faneuil Hall, 131 

Farewell Address, Washington's, 169 f., 

207 
Farm Loan Act, 502 n. 
Farmers' Alliance, 436 
Farragut, Admiral David, 351 f., 352 f., 

367, 453 
Federal Election Law, 431 
Federal ratio, 148 
Federal Reserve Act, 488 f. 
Federal Reserve banks, 490 
Federal Reserve Board, 490 and n. 
"Federalist, The," 146, 159 
Federalist party, 162 f., 164 f., 172 
Ferdinand and Isabella, 4 
Ferguson, Colonel, 120 
"Fifty-four forty or fight," 2 74f. 
Fillmore, Millard, 290 f. 
Finaeus, map of, 16 
Fish, Hamilton, 397 
Fiske, John, 8 
Fletcher, Admiral, 494 



INDEX 



XXXVll 



Fleuri, Cardinal, So 

Florida, 12 f., 102, 201 f., 205, 214 

Floyd, John B., 331 

Foch, General Ferdinand, 520 f., 522 

Fonseca Bay, 503 

Food, conservation, 514 f.; control act, 
515; production bill, S33 

Foote, Commodore A. H., 352 

Foote, Senator H. S., 229 

Force Bill, of 1833, 231; of 1S71, 393 
n. 2; of iSoo, 431, 433 

Ford, Henry, 504 

Forks of the Ohio, 83 

Forts, Donelson, 352 n.; Duquesne, 
83, 86; Henry, 352; Le Bceuf, 83; 
Louisburg, 80; Marion, 15; Neces- 
sity, 83 ; Orange, 48; Sumter, 331 f.; 
Ticonderoga, iiof.; Vancouver, 257; 
William Henry, 86 

"Forty-niners," 286 

"Fourteen Points," Wilson's, 519 

Fox, Charles James, 105, 107 

Fox, George, 522 

Franklin, Benjamin, citizen of Pennsyl- 
vania, 54; on colonies, 64; post- 
master, 65 ; and Albany Plan, 83 ; 
and Stamp Act, 96; loj^alty to Eng- 
land, iii; friend of Paine, 113; and 
Declaration of Independence, 114; 
envoy to France, 119; peace com- 
missioner, 127; Articles of Confeder- 
ation, 136; in Constitutional Con- 
vention, 142, 144 

Frederick the Great, 83 n. 

Fredericksburg, battle of, 354 

Freedman's Bureau, 384 n., 355 n. 2 

Freeport Doctrine, 317 f. 

Free Soilers, 285, 287, 330 n. 

Fremont, John C, 282 and n. 2, 312, 
330 n., 375 

French Alliance, 118 f., 128 

French colonies in America, 72 f. 

French and Indian War, 83 n., 85 

French Revolution, 164 f. 

Friends, 52 and n., 259 and n. 

Frontenac, Count, 77, 79 

Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, 250; of 
1850, 288, 291 f., 305 and n., 307, 
322, 328 

Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 39 

Fur posts, 138, 165, 167 

Gadsden purchase, 204 
Gag resolutions, 259 f. 



Gage, General Thomas, 105 f., iii 

Gallatin, Albert, 175, 212 

Gariicld, Harry A., 531 f. 

Garfield, James A., 399, 409 and n., 
410 and n. 

Garland, A. H., 4iSn. 

Garrison, Lindley A., 486, 502 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 255 f., 373 

Gates, General Horatio, 118, 120 

Geary, Governor of Kansas, 312 

'" General! Historie," of Smith, 30 

Genet, Edmond, 166 f. 

Geneva Tribunal, 396 

George, Henry, 423 n. i 

George I, 48, 93 

George II, 55 

George III, 100, 102, 107 f., iii,ii6f., 
123, 127, 241, 248 and n., 465 

Georgia, 27 n., 55, 105, 120, 220 

Germaine, Lord George, 117 

German drives, 519 f. 

Germantown, 54, 118, 248 

Germany, and World War, 497 ; de- 
stroys American lives, 499 ; plots of, 
SOI 

Gerry, Elbridge, 146, 170 

Gettysburg, battle of, 356 f., 358 

Ghent, Treaty of, 187 

Gibraltar, no, 127 

Giddings, Joshua R., 261 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, iS, 45 n. i 

Gist, Christopher, 82 

Gladstone, William E., 360 

Glass, Carter, 488, 524 n. 

Glass-Owen Bill, 488 

" Glorious Revolution," 44 

Goethals, George W., 492 

Gold in California, 285 f. 

Gold Democrats, 448 n. 2 

Gold famine of 1893, 437 f. 

"Golden pills," 107 

Goliad, 269 

Gondomar, Spanish minister, 30 

Gorges, Sir Fernando, 33 f., 41 f. 

Gorman, Senator A. P., 440 

Governors, Convention of 1908,472 

"Grand Model," 47 

" Grandfather clause," 431 n. 2 

Grangers, 404, 424 f. 

Grant, General U. S., victories in West, 
351 f. ; at Vicksburg, 356 f.; at Chat- 
tanooga, 363 f . ; commander of 
armies, 364; in Virginia, 364 f.; and 
Lee, 370 f.; attempted assassination. 



XXXVIU 



INDEX 



37311. i; elected in 1868, 38911.; as 
president, 392 f.; reelected, 394; and 
West Indies, 397; in campaign of 
1880, 408 f.; third-term agitation, 
408 f. 

Gray, Captain Robert, 266 

Great Britain, and Oregon, 274 f.; and 
Venezuela, 444 f. 

Great Meadows, battle of, 83 

Greeley, Horace, 305, 333 f., 376, 394 

Green, J. R., 108 

Green Mountain Boys, 110 

Greenbacks, 407 f . 

Greene, General Nathanael, 120 

Greenville, treaty of, 166 n. 

Gregory, Thomas W., 486 n. 

Grenville, George, 94 f., 98, 103, 129 

Guadalupe-Hidalgo, treaty of, 279 

Guadeloupe, 94 

Guam, 457 

Guiana, British, 444 f . 

Guilford, battle of, 120 

Guiteau, Charles, 410 

Hague Conferences, 478 n.i 

Hague Tribunal, 478, 497 

"Hail Columbia," 171 

Haiti, 6, 13 f., 219, 255, 503 

Hale, Edward Everett, 356 n. i 

Hale, John P., 330 n. 

Half Moon, 48 

"Half-breeds," 408 and n. 2 

Halleck, General H. W., 352 f. 

Hamilton, Alexander, at Annapolis 
Convention, 142 ; at Constitutional 
Convention, 142 ; and ratification of 
Constitution, 145; career, 159; Sec- 
retary of Treasury, 159 f-, i7S; and 
Jay Treaty, 168 ; major general, 171 ; 
opposition to Alien and Sedition 
Laws, 172; death, 179 

Hamilton, Colonel, at Detroit, 126 f. 

Hamilton, governor of S. C, 231 

Hamlin, Charles S., 490 n. 

Hampton, Indian school, 22 

Hampton Roads, 350, 369 

Hancock, John, 102, 105, 146 

Hancock, General W. S., 357, 409 

Hanna, Marcus A., 447, 463 n., 477 

Hanover, House of, 55, 92 f. 

Harding, Senator Warren G., elected 
president, 534 

Harlan, J. M., 426 

Harpers Ferry, 321 



Harriman, E. H., 480 

Harrison, Benjamin, 426 and n. 2, 

427 f., 435 f., 443 
Harrison, William H., 183, 188, 192, 

242 f., 270 
Hartford, 39 

Hartford Convention, 189 
Harvard College, 61, 65, 94 
Havana, 88 
Hawaii, 443, 444 n. 
Hawkins, John, 18 
Hay, John, 462, 463 n. i 
Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty, 475 
Hay-Herran treaty, 474 f . 
Hay-Pauncefote treaty, 473, 491 
Hayes, Rutherford B., 400, 404 f., 

407 
Haymarket riot, 423 n. 2 
Hayne, Robert, 224, 229 f. 
Helper, Hinton R., 342 
Hendricks, T. A., 419 
Henry, Patrick, 96 and n., 100, 103, 

108, no, 126, 146 
Henry, Prince of Portugal, 4 
Henry VII, 8, 10 
Henry VIII, 34 
Henry of Navarre, 18 
Hepburn Bill, 477 
Hessians, 112, 117 
Hicks, Governor of Maryland, 336 
"Higher Law," 290 
Hill, David B., 427, 436, 446 
Hill, James J., 480 
Hindenburg line, 521 
Hitchcock, Senator G. M., 528 
Holland, 35, 49 
Holy Alhance, 207 
Homestead Act, 398 • 
Hood, General John B., 366, 368 f. 
Hooker, General Joseph, 354, 363 
Hooker, Thomas, 39 
Hoover, Herbert C, 514 f. 
Hopkins, Stephen, 103 
House, Colonel E. M., 525 
"House divided against itself," 317 
Houston, D. F., 486, 524 n. 
Houston, General Sam, 269 
Howe, General William, 115 f., 130 
Hudson, Henry, 48 f., 72 
Hudson Bay, 77, 79 
Hudson's Bay Company, 267 
Huerta, General Victoriano, 493 f. 
Hughes, Charles E., 504f->53S 
Huguenots, 60 



INDEX 



XXXIX 



Hull, General William, i86 
Hundred Associates of Canada, 70, 73 
Hungary, 296 n. 2 
Hunter, General David, 375 
Huron Indians, 74 

Hutchinson, Governor Thomas, 97 and 
n., 100, 105 

Idaho, 430 

Idealism, American, 535 

Illinois, 194 

"Immemorial rights," 106 

Immigration, 296, 403 f. 

"Impending Crisis, The," 342 

Impressment, 167, 181 f. 

Income tax, 152, 359, 440, 487 

Independence Hall, 131 

Independent Treasury, 236 

Independents, 34 

India House, 14 

Indiana, 194 

Indians, American, 19 f., 165 f., 430, 

431 n. I 
Indies, 3, 7 
Industrial Employers' Arbitration Act, 

491 
Industrial Revolution, 156 
Industrial unrest, 530 
Industries, of i860, 340, 341 n. i ; after 

Civil War, 402 f. ; of 1900, 464 f. 
Initiative, 481 n. 
Injunction, 441, 44211. 
Insular cases, 461 
Insurance, war, 525 
"Insurgents," 443, 480 f. 
Interstate Commerce Act, 425 f. 
"Intolerable Acts," 102 f., 107 
Iowa, 301 
Ireland, 296 

Iroquois Indians, 53, 77, 80, 137 
Irrigation policy, 472 
Irving, Washington, 200 
Isthmus of Panama, 297, 412, 462 {see 

Panama) 
Italy, quarrel with U. S., 435 ; victories 

in World War, 522 n. 
I. W. W., 518, 532 f. 

Jackson, Andrew, at New Orleans, 
187 f.; and Florida, 192, 203 f. ; char- 
acter, 214 f.; and election of 1824, 
215 f.; elected in 1828, 225; and 
tariff, 225, 229; as president, 227 f.; 
"reign" of, 227; and bank, 231 f.; 



censured, 234; and Texas, 270; on 
Mexico, 279; character, 329 n.i 

Jackson, Governor of Missouri, 335 

Jackson, General T. J. ("Stonewall"), 
348 n. 2, 354 and notes 

Jackson, Mich., 307 

Jamaica, 15, 91 f., 119, 127 

James I, 27 f., 34, 49, 92 

James II, 43 f ., 50 

Jamestown, 29, 32 f., 35, 247 

Japan, 478, 508, 510 

Jay, John, iii, 127 f., 142, 146, 167 

Jay Treaty, 167 f. 

Jefferson, Thomas, home at Monticello, 
63 ; writes Declaration of Independ- 
ence, 114; supports G. R. Clark, 
126; minister to France, 138, 142; 
and public lands, 157; Secretary of 
State, 158 f.; leader of Democrats, 
162 f.; resigns from cabinet, 169; 
vice president, 170; and election of 
1800, 172 f.; and Kentucky Resolu- 
tions, 172; political views, i74f.; 
president, 174 f.; death, 197; and 
Monroe Doctrine, 206 ; and manu- 
factures, 221; birthday dinner of 
1830, 230; and slavery, 248 n., 249; 
and Missouri Compromise, 254; 
master of Congress, 486 

Jenckes, 410 

Jersey, 52 

Jerusalem, capture, 522 n. 

"Jesuit Relations," 74 

Jesuits, 64, 74 

Joffre, Marshal, 512 

Johnson, Andrew, 352 n. 2, 381 f ., 385 f ., 
387 n., 392 and n., 471 

Johnson, Governor Hiram, 484 

Johnson governments, 383 

Johnston, General Albert S., 352 

Johnston, General Joseph E., 347, 365 

Joliet, map, 72, 76 f. 

Jones, John Paul, 119 

Judicial department, 151 

Kalm, Peter, 67, 94 

Kanawha, battle of, 124 

Kansas, 14, 308 f., 310 f ., 316 n., 346 n. 2 

Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 301 f. 

Kaskaskia, 126 

Kearny, General Stephen W., 2 76f. 

Keith, Governor of Penn., 81 

Kellogg, 329 

Kelly, Mrs. Florence, 517 



xl 



INDEX 



Kendall, Amos, 260 

Kent Island, 46 

"Kentucke," 124 

Kentucky, 250 

Kentucky Resolutions, 172 

Kerensky, 520 n. 

Key, Francis Scott, 186 

King, Rufus, 189, 212 

King George's War, So and n. 

King William's War, 80 and n. 

King's College (Columbia), 65 

"King's Friends," 107, 127 

King's Mountain, battle of, 120 i. 

Kitson, H. H., 104 

Klondike, 463 

Knights of Labor, 404 

Know-Nothing party, 307 n. 2 

Knox, John, 171 

Knox, P. C, 482 

Knoxville convention, 218 

Kosciusko, 120 n. 

Kossuth, 296 n. 2 

Ku-Klux Klans, 388 

Labor, in the thirties, 23S f. ; under 
Cleveland, 423 f . ; party, 400 

Labrador, 8 n., 10 

Lachine, 18, 71 

Lafayette, i2on., 122 f., 133 

La Follette, 480, 483 f., 504 

Lake Champlain, 78 

Lake Erie, 71 ; battle of, 186 

Lamar, L. Q. C., 418 n. 

Lane, F. K., 486, 524 n. 

Lansing, Robert, 486 n., 524 n., 528 

La Salle, Robert Cavelier, de, 74 f . 

Lavoisier, 66 

Lawrence, A. A., 309 n. 

Lawrence, Kansas, 309 and n., 311 

League of Nations, 525 f., 534 

Lear, Tobias, 66, 249 n. 

Le BcEuf, Fort, 83 

Lecky, W. E. H., 108 

Leclerc, General, 177 

Lecompton Constitution, 315 

Lee, General Charles, 116, 120 

Lee, Daniel, 267 

Lee, Jason, 267 

Lee, Richard Henry, 113 f., 146 

Lee, Robert E., 213 ; at Harpers Ferry, 
322; and Confederacy, 336; on Se- 
cession, 344; and north, 354, 356 f.; 
surrender of, 370 f.; after war, 
370 n. 



Leif the Lucky, 8n. 

Leisler, Jacob, son. 

Lenine, 520 n. 

Lenox Globe, 16 

Lever Act, 531 

Lewis, John L., 531 

Lewis and Clark Expedition. 177, 
266 

Lexington, battle of, 104 f., iii, 125, 
130, 182, 336, 452 

Leyden, 36 

Liberal Republicans, 394 

Liberator, The, 256 f. 

Liberty Loans, 517 

Liberty party, 261, 285, 330 n. 

Liliuokalani, Queen, 443 

Lincoln, Abraham, and Mrs. Stowe, 
105 n.; and Jackson, 228; and 
Douglas, 316 f.; Cooper Union 
Speech, 322; nominations, 324, 367; 
election in i860, 325; in 1864, 367; 
and South, 327, 328 n.; inaugural 
address, 331 f.; and Fort Sumter, 
333 ; call for troops, 334 ; and capi- 
tal, 336 £.; and war, 346; and Trent 
affair, 349; and Meade, 358 n. 2; 
on freeing of the Mississippi, 358; 
on war finance, 359; at Hampton 
Roads, 369; in Richmond, 370; as- 
sassination of, 373 ; on emancipation, 
375 f.; to Greeley, 376 n.; plan of 
reconstruction, 382 and n.; on negro 
suffrage, 387 n. 

Lind, Governor John, 493 

Lisbon, 7, 13 

Literature, American, 200 f. 

Little Big Horn, battle of, 405 n. 2 

Livingston, R. R., 114, i76f. 

Lloyd George, 519, 526 

Locke, John, 47 

Lodge, Senator H. C, 527 f. 

Log cabin campaign, 243 f. 

London Company, 27, 33 

Lopez, Narcisso, 298 

Louis XIV, 54, 60, 73 f., 82 

Louisburg, fort, 80, 86 

Louisiana, 76, 80, 194, 203, 250, 265 

Louisiana Purchase, 176 and n., 301 

Lovejoy, Elijah, 261 

Lowell, James Russell, 280, 330, 374 n., 

393 n- I 
Loyalists {see Tories), 120 
Lundy, Benjamin, 255 f. 
Lusitania, torpedoed, 498 f. 



INDEX 



xli 



Luzon, 4S7 
Lyons, Captain, 335 
Lyons, Lord, 349 

McAdoo, William G., 486, 516, 524 n. 

McCIellan, General George B., 348 and 
n-, 353, 354, 3^7 and n. 

McCormick, 237 

McCulloch vs. Maryland, 199, 233 

MacDonough, Thomas, 186 

McDowell, General, 347 

McHenry, Fort, 186 

MacKaye, Percy, 492 

McKinley, William, and tariff, 432 f.; 
election of, 446 f ., 449 ; and Cuba, 
452 ; and Philippines, 458 f . ; assassi- 
nated, 465 

Macon's Bill, 183 

McPherson, General, 364 

McReynolds, James M., 486 

Madero, 493 

Madison, James, 141; in Constitu- 
tional Convention, 142, 144; and 
"The Federalist," 146; and Virginia 
Resolutions, 172 ; as president, 182 f.; 
and internal improvements, 196; and 
West Florida, 203; and Spanish 
America, 205 

Magellan, Ferdinand, 12 f. 

Magna Carta, 68 

Maine, 42, 45, 252, 253 n. 

Maine, the, 452 

Malvern Hill, battle of, 348 

Man Power Act, 524 

Manassas, battle of, 347 

Manhattan, 48 

"Manifest destiny," 459, 463 

Manila, 88, 453 f., 456 

March to the sea, Sherman's, 369 n. 

Marcy, William M., 240, 298, 303 n. 

Mare clausum, 434 

Maritime science, 4 

Marlborough, Duke of, 79 

Marne, battle of, 520 

Marquette, Pcre, 76 f . 

Marshall, John, 170, 172, 179, 198!. 

Martin, Senator T. S., 524 n. 

Marye's Heights, battle of, 354 

Maryland, 45 f., 136 f., 336 

Mason, George, 142 

Mason, John, 41 f. 

Mason, John Y., 298, 349, 360 n. 

Mason and Dixon's line, 53 n., 339 
and n. 



Massachusetts Bay Colony, 36 f., 42 f., 

45, 102 f. 
Max, Prince of Baden, 522 
Maximilian, Archduke, 395 
Mayflower, 34 f., 39 n. i 
Mayo, Admiral, 494 
Meade, General George, 356 f., 35S n. 2 
Mecklenburg Declaration, 113 n. 
Mercantile theory of commerce, 57, qi 
Mercator, 11 n., 17 
Merchantmen, armed, 507 f . 
Meredith, E. T., 524 n. 
"Merit system," 411 
Mexico, 13 f., 66, 267 f., 272, 275 f., 

403 f.; war with, 276, 277 f., 279 
Middle colonies, 64 f. 
"Middle passage," 247 f. 
"Midnight judges," 173 
Milan Decree, 180 

Miles, General Nelson A., 455 n., 456 
Mills, Roger Q., 422 
Miquelon, 88 

Missionary Ridge, battle of, 363 and n. 
Mississippi, 194 
Mississippi River, 14, 70 f., 74 
Missouri, 194, 250 and n., 335 
Missouri Compromise, 250 f., 252 f., 

283, 302, 320, 329 
Mobile, 203, 36S 
Mohawk Valley, 52 
Monitor, 349 f . 
Monmouth, battle of, 120 
Monroe, James, 176, 189, 197, 201, 

253 
Monroe Doctrine, 206 f., 210, 219, 395, 

444 f ■, 493 
Montana, 430 
Montcalm, General, 87 f. 
Monterey, Calif., 286 
Monterey, Mexico, 277 
Montezuma, 13 

Montgomery, Ala., 327, 37,^, 346 
Montgomery, Richard, 112 
Monticello, 63 
Montreal, 18, 71, 88 
Moore, John B., 409 n. 
Morgan, General, 118, 120 
Morgan, J. P., 438 f., 488 
Mormons, 431 n. i 
Morris, Gouverneur, 138, 142, 174 
Morris, Robert, 142 
Mount Vernon, convention at, 141, 163 
"Muck-raking," 481 
Mugwumps, 412 f. 



xlii 



INDEX 



Miinster's map, 17 
Murfreesboro, battle of, 361 

Napoleon Bonaparte, 79, 88, 171, 175 f., 

180 f., 1S4, 187, 203, 220 
Napoleon III, 343, 360 n., 395 
Nashville, battle of, 369 
Nashville Convention, 292 
National banks, 359 f . • 

National Defense Act, 502 
Naturalization Act, 171 
Navigation Acts, 57 f., 91 f., 94 f., 102, 

106 
Navy, American, 171, 185 f., 428 f., 

434, 513 f- 
Nebraska, 301 f. 
Negro problem, 535 
Nelson, Admiral, 180 
Netherlands, 78 
Neutrality in World War, 510 
Nevada, 398, 403, 407 
New Amsterdam, 41, 64 
Newcastle, 53 n. 
New England, 33 f., 61 f., 188 f., 200, 

217, 223 f., 247 f. 
New England Confederation, 42 
New England Emigrant Aid Society, 

309 
Newfoundland, 18, 71, 79 
New France, 70 f ., 79 f ., 82 
"New Freedom," the, 486 
New Granada, 297 
New Hampshire, 42 
New Haven, 40 f. 
New Jersey, 52 f. 
New Jersey plan, 142 f. 
New Mexico, 276 f., 279, 431 n. i 
New Netherland, 42, 48 f ., 5c, 97 
New Orleans, 76, 88, 138, 168, 176, 

187 f., 214, 298, 352, 435 
Newport, 139 and n. 
Newspapers, colonial, 66 f . 
New York, 12, 48 f., 77, 132, 137 
Niagara, 81, 86 
Nicaragua, 473 f ., 503 
Nicholson, Governor of N. Y., 50 
Nicolet, Jean, 74 
Nobel, Alfred, 478 n. 2 
Nonintercourse Act, 167, 182 
North, resources in Civil War, 340 f. 
North, Lord, 100, 107, 118, 127 
North Carolina, 19, 47, 113 n., 145 
North Dakota, 430 
Northwest Ordinance, 140 f. 



Northwest Territory, 126, 252 
" Notes on Virginia," 249 
Nullification, 229 f. 

Obiter dictum, 31411, 2 

Ogden, 399 

Oglethorpe, James, 55, 81 

Ohio, 70 f., 250 

Ohio Company, 82, 157 

Ohio Valley, 81 f., 83 

Oklahoma, 431 n. i 

Old Dominion, 32 

Old South Church, 131 

Oliver, 97 

Olney, Richard, 444 

Omnibus Bill, 287 f. 

"Open door" in China, 463 n. i 

Orders in Council, 180 f. 

Oregon, 177, 201, 266 f., 271 f., 2;;4, 

283, 401 and n. 
Oregon, the, 454 n. 
Oriskany, battle of, 117 
Orlando, Signor, 526 
Orleans Territory, 178 n. 
Ostend Manifesto, 303 n., 312 
Oswego, 81 
Otis, General, 457 
Otis, James, 59, 95 n., 96 f ., 102 
Owen, Senator, 488 

Pacific Ocean, 12 

Pacific railways, 398 f. 

Pacifism, 500 f., 518 

Paine, Thomas, 113 

Pakenham, British general, 187 f. 

Palma, Estrada, 460 

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 524 n. 

Palmer, John M., 448 n. 2 

Palo Alto, battle of, 276 

Palos, 4 

Panama, 13; Congress, 219; canal, 

472 f., 475, 492; revolution, 474 f.; 

tolls, 491 f. 
Pan-Americanism, 433, 465, 476 n. 2 
Panic, of 1837, 235,' 236 n.; of 1857, 

316 n. 2; of 1873, 399 f- 
Paris, Peace of (17S3) 88 f., (1899) 

457, (1019) 525 
Parker, Alton B., 477 
Parker, Captain John, 104 f. 
Parker, Theodore, 322 n. 
Parliament, authority of, in colonies, 

90 f., 106 f. 
" Parsons' Cause," 96 n. 



INDEX 



xliii 



Parties, political, 162 f., 240 and n. 

Paternalism, French, 73 

Paterson, Governor of New Jersey, 142 

Patrons of Husbandry, 404 

Patroons, 48 

Patterson, General, 347 

Payne, John B., 524 n. 

Payne- Aldrich Act, 481 

Peking, relief of, 462 

Pemberton, General, 357 f. 

Pendleton, Louis, 342 n. 

Pendleton Act, 411 

Peninsular campaign, 348 

Penn, William, 52 f. 

Pennsylvania, 50, 52 f. 

Pensacola, 203 f. 

Pensions, 426 and n.3, 428 f. 

Pepperrell, Colonel, 80 

Pequot Indians, 40 

Percy. Lord, 105 

Perry, Captain O. H., 186 

Perryville, battle of, 361 

Pershing, General J. J., 513, 520 

Personal Liberty Acts, 315 

Peru, 14 f . 

Petersburg, 370 

Philadelphia, 54, loi, 103, no, 119, 

311 f., 402 
Philip, King, 18, 36 and n. i 
Philip II, IS 
Philippine Islands, 12, 4S3 f., 457 f.j 

459 f •, 491 
Piave, battle of, 522 n. 
Pickens, Governor of South Carolina, 

333 
Pickett's charge, 357 
Pierce, Franklin, 293 f., 302, 303 n., 

304, 311, 334 
Pilgrim Fathers, 34 f., 71, 211 
Pinckney, C. C, 17c, 179 
Pinckney, Thomas, 168 
Pinzon, Martin, 6 
Pitcairn, Major, 104 f. 
Pitt, William (Earl of Chatham), 86, 

93, 99, 107, 129 
Pittsburgh, 87, 308, 406 
Pizarro, 14 

Piatt, Orville C, 460 n. 
Piatt, Thomas, 405, 410 and n. 
Plattsburg, camp at, 502 
Plumb plan, 529 
Plymouth, colony, 42 f. 
Plymouth Company, 27, 33, 49 
Poinsett, 231 



Polk, James K., 273!., 2 78f., 284, 298 

Ponce de Leon, 13 

Pontiac, Chief, 95, 124 

Pope, General John, 352 f. 

Pope Benedict XV, 518 

Popular sovereignty, 284, 311 

Populists, 436 

Port Hudson, 353, 358 

Portland, 112 

Porto Rico, 13, IS, 219, 456 f., 461, 

503 
Portsmouth, Treaty of, 478 
Portuguese explorers, 3 f . 
Post office, 64 f ., 93 
Pottawatomie, 310 f., 322 n. 
Preble, Captain, 179 
Pre-Columbian voyages, 8 n. 
Preparedness, S02 
President, powers of, 150 f. 
Presidential Succession Act, 419 f. 
Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, 293 
Primogeniture, 63 
Princeton college, 65 
Printing press, 66 f . 
Priority orders, 516 
Proclamation line of 1763, 123 
Proclamation of Neutrality of 1793, 

16S 
Products of United States, 467 
Progressive party, 483 f ., 504 
Prohibition, 152, 533 
Proprietary colonies, 45 f . 
Proprietary grants, maj?^, 51 
Protestants, 26 f., 46 
Providence, 38 
Ptolemy, 4, 11 n. 
Public lands, 157, 200, 229, 235 
Pueblos, 19 
Pujo Committee, 488 
Pulaski, Count, 120 n. 
Pullman strike, 441 
Pure Food and Drugs Bill, 477 
Puritans, 36 n. i, 61 f. 

Quakers, 42, 52 
Quebec, 71, 87 f., 112 
Queen Anne's War, Son. 
Quincy, Josiah, 265 
Quitrents, 45 

Railroads, 220 n., 237 f., 294 f., 398 f.,' 

405 f., 424 f., 516, 5281, 530 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 19, 34, 45 n. i 
Randolph, Edmund, 113, 142, 169 



xliv 



INDEX 



Randolph, Sir Edward, 43 and n. 

Randolph, John, 184, 222, 249 and n. 

Raphael, 11 

"Rebel Flag Order," 427 and n. 

Recall, 481 n. 

Reciprocity, 433, 482 n. 

Reconcentration camps, 451 

Reconstruction, 381 f.; acts, 3S6 and 
n.3; governments, 387, 388 n. 

Redfield, William C, 486, 524 n. 

"Reds," 532 f. 

Reed, Thomas B., 428!. 

Referendum, 481 n. 

Reign of Terror, 165 

Removal of deposits, 233 f . 

Republican partv, 307, 324 f. 

Resaca da la Palma, battle of, 276 

Resumption of specie payments, 
407 f. 

Revere, Paul, 105, 130 

Rhode Island, 38 f ., 42, 56, 142, 145 

Rhodes, James F., 304 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 70, 73 

Richmond, 346, 370 

Rio Grande, 275 f. 

Rio Janeiro, 476 n. 

Rip van Winkle, 50 

Ripon, Wisconsin, 307 n.3 

Roanoke, 19 

Robertson, J., 124 

Robinson, Charles, 310 

"Rock of Chickamauga," 363 

Rockingham, Lord, 98 f. 

Roman Empire, 157 

Roosevelt, Theodore, on American 
Revolution, 94; and Jackson, 2 28; 
on Civil Service, 411; and "Rough 
Riders," 455 ; president, 465 ; career 
to 1901, 466; ideals, 468 f.; and car- 
porations, 469; and labor, 470; and 
conservation, 471 ; and Panama, 
475 n. I ; and Monroe Doctrine, 476 ; 
reelected, 477; foreign influence, 
478 ; ex-president, 479 f . ; candidate 
in 191 2, 483 f.; in 1916, 504 f.; and 
World War, 534 

Root, Elihu, 459 n. 2, 476 n. i 

Rosecrans, General, 361 f. 

Rough Riders, 455 

Rules Committee, 428 n. 

Rush, Richard, 206 

Russell, Lord John, 395 f., 446 

Russia, 396, 520 n., 478 n.i 

Rutledge, John, 103 



St. Augustine, 15 

St. Clair, General Arthur, 166 n., 183 

St. Croix, 504 

St. John, island, 503 

St. Lawrence River, 18, 70 f. 

St. Leger, 117 

St. Lusson, 74 

St. Marks, 204 

St. Marys, 46 

St. Mihiel, 521 

St. Pierre, 88 

St. Thomas, 503 

Salem, 38, 43, 105 

Salisbury, Lord, 434, 444 f . 

Samoa, 433 f . 

Sampson, Admiral W. T., 454 f. 

San Diego, 277 

San Ildefonso, 175 f., 178 

San Jacinto, battle of, 269, 274 f. 

San Juan Hill, battle of, 455 

San Salvador, 16 

Sandford, John F., 313 

Sandys, Sir Edwin, 31 

Santa Anna, 269 f., 277 

Santa Fe, 277 

Santiago, battle of, 455 f . 

Santo Domingo, 91 f., 397, 476, 503 

Saratoga, 117 f. 

Savannah, 120 and n., 369 

"Scalawags," 384 n. 

Schenectady, 79 

Schley, Admiral W. S., 454 n. i, 456 

Schofield, General J. M., 364 

Schurman, Jacob G., 459 n. i 

Schurz, Carl, 394 

Scioto Company, 157 

Scotch-Irish, 60, 155 

Scott, General Winfield, 277 f., 294, 

307 n. I, 346 
Seal fisheries, 434 
Secession, threats of, 312; ordinance 

of, 325 f.; right of, 330 f.; border 

states, 335 
Selective Service Act, 512 
Seminole Indians, 203 f. 
Senatorial courtesy, 152 
Separatists, 34 f . 
Serajevo, 497 
Serbia, 497 

Seven Years' War, 83 n. 
Seventh-of-March speech, 289 f . 
Sevier, John, 124, 155 
Seville, 14 
Seward, William H., on Compromise 



INDEX 



xlv 



of 1850, 290; and Kansas-Nebraska 
Act, 302 f . ; and Dred Scott case, 
314; and Convention of i860, 324 
and n. ; and Trent affair, 349 ; on vic- 
tories, 368; at Hampton Roads, 369; 
attempted assassination, 3710.1; 
and emancipation, 376; and Maxi- 
milian, 395 ; purchases Alaska, 396 f. 

Shafter, General W. R., 455 f. 

Shakespeare, 32 

Sharpsburg, battle of, 3 54 

Shays's rebellion, 139 

Shelburne, Lord, 127 

Shenandoah Valley, 60, 81, 368 

Shepherd, William R., 476 n. 2 

Sheridan, General Philip H., 363 and 
n-» 368, 395 

Sherman, John, Secretary of Treasury, 
408; president pro tempore of 
Senate, 420; in convention of 1888, 
426; and Harrison, 427; Secretary 
of State, 463 

Sherman, Roger, 103, 114, 142, 144 

Sherman, General William T., atVicks- 
burg, 356; on war, 362; cooperates 
with Grant, 364; takes Atlanta, 366; 
march to sea, 368 

Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 490 

Sherman Silver Purchase Act, 432, 

437 f. 

Shiloh, battle of, 352 

Ship Registry Act, 491 

Shirley, Governor, 82 

Silver, free, 406 and n., 437 f., 446 f., 
447 n. 

Sinclair, Upton, 518 

Sitting Bull, Chief, 505 n. 2 

Slave trade, encouraged by English 
kings, 93 ; in Constitution, 144 ; in 
eighteenth century, 247 f.; prohibi- 
tion, 249; reopened, 3200., 321 

Slavery, brought to Virginia, 31; ex- 
cluded from Georgia, 55; in the 
Constitution, 144; amendments, 152 ; 
ominous in 1837, 244; in colonies, 
247 f.; petitions for abolition of, 
249; early favorable legislation, 250; 
in District of Columbia, 250; ex- 
tension of, 252; and Missouri Com- 
promise, 253; moral issue, 254 f.; 
restrictive laws, 257; apologies for, 
261 f. ; abolished in West Indies, 
262; and West, 266; and Oregon, 
283; in Mexican cession, 283 f.; 



status in 1850, 291; labor, 296 n.i; 
status 1844-1854, 300; and Con- 
gress, 317 f.; in territories, 317; fixed 
on South, 320; and Civil War, 330, 
374; nature, 342; abolished in ter- 
ritories, 376 

Slidell, John, 275, 343, 349, 36011. 

Sloat, Commodore John D., 276 

Smith, Caleb, 324 

Smith, John, 29 f., 34 

Smith-Lever Act, 491 

Socialists, 506, 518 and n, 

"Solid South," 409, 479 

"Soo" (Sault Sainte Marie), 430 

Soule, Pierre, 298 

South, resources, 340 f.; disappointed 
hopes in 1861, 343 f.; progress after 
war, 429 

South America, our relations with, 476 

South Carolina, 47; and nullification, 
230 f.; secession of, 326 and n. 

South Dakota, 430 

South River, 49 

South Sea, 12 n. 

Southampton, Earl of, 32 

Southampton massacre, 256 f. 

Spain, possessions in 1815, 201 ; in 
America, 205 f. 

Spanish boundary of 1819, 205 n. 

Spanish explorers, 13 f.; government 
in America, 14 f. 

Spanish Succession, War of the, 79 n. 

Spanish-American War, 452 f., 461 f. 

Spargo, John, 518 n. 

Speaker of House, 152, 428 and n. 

Specie Circular, 235 

Specie payments, 407 f. 

Spoils system, 237 

Squatter sovereignty, 284, 302 

"Stalwarts," 408 and n. 2, 411 

Stamp Act, 95 f., oS; Congress, 97 

Stanton, Edwin M., 329, 348 n. i, 374 

"Star-Spangled Banner," 186 

"Starving time" in Virginia, 30 

State banks, 178 

States, powers of, 148 f. 

Stephens, Alexander H., 323, 327 f.. 

346, 369 
Steuben, Baron von, 120 n. 
Stevens, John L., 443 
Stevens, Thaddeus, 385 and n.i, 398 
Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 518 n. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 305 n. 
Strict construction, 153 



xlvi 



INDEX 



Strikes, under Cleveland, 423 and n. 2 ; 

coal, of 1919, 531 
Stuart kings, 27 f., 78 
Students' Armv Training Corps (S. A. 

T. C), 524 
Stuyvesant, Peter, 48 f., 53 
Submarines, 498, 507 f., 511 f. 
Suez Canal, 475 n. 2 
Suffrage, negro, 386 f., 431 n. 2 ; woman, 

5.33 
Sugar and Molasses Act, 91, 95 
Sumner, Charles, and abolition, 258; 
assaulted, 311 and n.; and Trent af- 
fair, 349 and n.; character, 398, 402 
Sumter, Fort, 331 f. 
Supreme Council of Allies, 526 
Supreme Court, 148, 151, 198 f., 233, 

314, 317, 533 
Surplus, in Cleveland's day, 420 f. 
Susquehannock Indians, 77 
Sussex pledge, 499 f . 
Sweden, colonies, 49 and n., 70 
Sym.mes company, 157 

Taft, William H., and Philippines, 
459 f.; election of, 479; and reform, 
481 f.; campaign of 1912, 484 f. 

Talleyrand, Prince, 170, 176 

Tallmadge, James, 251, 253 

Tampico, 493 

Taney, Roger B., 23*4 and n., 242, 314, 

38Sn.3 

Tariff, of 1789, 161 f.; of 1816, 221, 
223; of 1824, 221; of 1828, 222 f.; 
of 1846, 313; of 1S83, 4^5; and 
Cleveland, 421 f. ; of 1890, 432 f. ; in 
dependencies, 461; of 1897, 463; of 
1909, 481 ; of 1913, 487 

" Taxation without Representation," 

94 f. 

Taylor, General Zachary, at Rio 
Grande, 275; nominated for presi- 
dency, 284; election of, 285; death 
of, 290; at North, 341 n. 2 

Tecumseh, Chief, 192 

Teller, Henry M., 448 n. i 

Teller Resolution, 452 

Ten per cent plan, 382 

Tennessee, 250, 352 n. 2, 386 

Tenure of Office Act, 392, 419 

Texas, Spanish exploration of, 13 ; 
I,a Salle in, 76 n. ; surrendered to 
Spain, 214 n.; expansion to, 265; in 
1830, 267 f.j annexation of, 269 f., 



274, 280; boundaries, 288; in Cora- 
promise of 1850, 288, 291 

Thacher, Thomas, 66 

Thames, battle of the, 186 

Thayer, Eli, 308 f . 

Thomas, General G. H., 362 f., 364, 

369 

Thomas, Senator, 253 

Thompson, Secretary, 331 

Three Lower Counties, 53 

Three Rivers, 73 

Thwaites, R. G., 74 

Ticonderoga, 86 

Tilden, Samuel J., 400 

Tippecanoe, battle of, 183, 192, 244 

Tolerat'on Act, 46 

Toombs, Robert, 287 

Topeka Convention, 309 

Toral, General, 455 f. 

Tordesillas, treaty, 8 

Tories {see Loyalists), 98 n., iii, 113, 

118, 125, 129 f. 
Toscanelli, 5 

Townshend Acts, 99 f., 103, 129 
Trade routes, early, 3 
Trafalgar, battle of, 180 
Transportation, in 1789, 156 f.; Act, 

530 " 

Treaty, Tordesillas, 8; Utrecht, 60, 
79; Paris (1763), 88; French (1778), 
118 f., 136, 171; Paris (1783), 129; 
Greenville, 166 n.; Jay, 167 f.; 
Pinckney, 168; French (1800), 171; 
San Ildefonso, 175 f.; Ghent, 187; 
Webster-Ashburton, 271; Gauda- 
lupe-Hidalgo, 279; Gadsden, 294; 
Clayton-Bulwer, 297 ; Burlingame, 
405 n. I ; Hay-Pauncefote, 473 ; Hay- 
Herran, 474; Hay-Bunau-Varilla, 
475 ; Portsmouth, 478; Brest- 
Litovsk, 520 n.; Versailles, 527 f., 534 

Trent affair, 349 

Trenton, battle of, 117 

Trevelyan, George O., 108 

"Trewe Relaycion," 30 

Tripoli, 179 

Trist, Nicholas, 278 f. 

Trotzky, 520 n. 

Troup, Governor, 220 

Trusts, 422 f., 464 

Tryon, Governor, 112 

Turks, 3 f. 

Turner, Nat, 256 n. 

Tuscania, 514 



INDEX 



xlvii 



Tweed, William M. ("Boss"), 393 
Tyler, John, 270, 274 

" Uncle Tom's Cabin," 305 n. 

" Unconditional Surrender " Grant, 

352 n. I 
Underground railroad, 292 f. 
Underwood tariff, 487 
Union Pacific railroad, 398 f. 
"Unwritten laws" of Constitution, 

151 f. 
Upshur, A. P., 271 
Utah, 431 n. I 
Utrecht, treaty of, 60, 79 

Vallandigham, Clement, 355, 356 n. 

Valley Forge, 118, 130 

Valparaiso, 435 

Van Buren, Martin, in Jackson's cabi- 
net, 228; succeeds Jackson, 236; in 
election of 1836, 242 ; and Texas, 
270; Free-Soil candidate, 285, 330 n. 

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 297, 480 

Vagrancy laws, 383 

Vasco da Gama, 7 

Venango, Fort, 83 

Venezuela, 444 f . 

Vera Cruz, 277, 404 

Vergennes, 119, 128, 130, i4on. 

Vermont, 250 

Verrazano, 18, 71 

Vicksburg, convention at, 320; capture 
of, 356 f.; siege of, 358 n.i; effect 
of fall of, 360; trenches of, 389 

Victoria, Queen, 343 

Victory Loan, 517 n. 

Villa, General, 494 

Vincennes, 126 f. 

Virgin Islands, 504 

Virginia, name of, 19; map, 28; settle- 
ment, 27 f.; courts, 64 n.; plan, 
142 f.; resolutions, 172; Civil War 

in, 34S f •» 364 f • 
Virginia, the, 349 f. 
Virginius affair, 397 and n. 
Viviani, 512 

Von Diederich, Admiral, 462 n. 
Von Papen, Captain, 501 

Wabash case, 425 
Wade, Benjamin, 303 
Wade-Davis Bill, 382 n. 
Waldseemiiller, Martin, 10 
Walker, Robert J., 315, 334 



Walker tariff, 313 

Walling, W. E., 518 n. 

Walpole, Robert, 60, 80, 92 f. 

"War Hawks," 183 f. 

War Labor Board, 530 

War Revenue Act, of 1917, 517; of 
1918, 517 

War Risk Bureau, 525 

War Zone, 506 

Ward, of Rhode Island, 112 

Warren, General Joseph, 102 

Warville, Brissot de, 139 n. 

Washburne, E. B., 364 

Washington, George, 55, 66; in French 
and Indian War, 83 f . ; in House of 
Burgesses, 100; in Continental Con- 
gress. 103 ; commanding army, no f. ; 
on Paine's "Common Sense," 113; 
proclaims Declaration of Independ- 
ence to army, 115; conduct of Revo- 
lution, 116 f.; and Tories, 130; re- 
tirement from war, 130, 132 ; 
thanked by Congress, 140; propose?, 
stronger government, 141 ; president 
of Constitutional Convention, 142 ; 
president of United States, 150; in- 
auguration, 157 f.; policies, 157 f.; 
reelected, 164; neutrality, 165 f.; 
Farewell Address, 169; abuse of, 170; 
commander, 171; and Monroe Doc- 
trine, 207 ; and slavery, 249 and n. 

Washington Conference, 534 

Washington, city of,. 174, 186, 336 f. 

Washington, state, 430, 533 

Watauga, battle on the, 124 

"Watchful waiting," 493 

Waterloo, 79 

Wayne, General Anthony, 166 n. 

Wealth, national, 403, 534 

Weaver, James B., 436 

Webster, Daniel, on Northwest Ordi- 
nance, 140; on Hamilton, 159 f.; on 
growth of West, 194; character of, 
211; reply to Hayne, 229 f.; and 
abolition, 258; Ashburton treaty, 
271 ; and Texas, 271 ; and Tyler, 271 ; 
on Compromise of 1850, 289 f., 292; 
death, 294 n.; Hiilsemann letter, 
296 n. 2; and Spain, 208; Secretary 
of State, 271, 206 n., 298 

West, in Revolutionary War, 123 f.; 
growth after 1815, 191 f., 194; routes 
to, 195; pioneers, 217; expansion to, 
264 f., 282 



xlviii 



INDEX 



West Florida, 203 

West India Company, Dutch, 48 

West Indies, 91 f., 94, 123, 128, 138, 

165 f., 180, 262 
West Virginia, 344 
Wethersfield, 39 
Weyler, General Valeriano, 451 
Wheeler, General Joseph, 463 
Whig party, 98 n., 240 and notes i, 2, 

241 f ., 305 f. 
Whigs, English, 241 
Whisky Rebellion, 170 and n. 
White, H. M., 525 
Whitman, Marcus, 267 
Whitman, Walt, 373 n. 2 
Whitney, EH, 193, 194 "-, 248 
Whittier, John G., 309 n., 313 
Wickersham, George W., 482 
Wildcat banks, 235 and n., 236 
Wilderness campaign, 364 f . 
Wilkes, Captain, 349 
Wilkinson, General James, 179 
William III, 44 f., 50, 57 n., 60, 78 

and n. 
Williams, Roger, 38 f., 47, 54 
Williamsburg, 65 
Wilmot Proviso, 283 
Wilson, Henry L., 493 
Wilson, James, 142 
Wilson, William B., 486 
Wilson, William L., 439 
Wilson, Woodrow, 327 n.; and Porto 

Rico, 461 ; election of, 484 f. ; 

policies, 485 f . ; governor of New 

Jersey, 485 n.; and Panama, 491; 

and Mexico, 493 f . ; and prepared- 



ness, 502 ; reelection, 505 f. ; on 
peace, 506 ; breaks with Germany, 
506 f . ; recommends war, 508 ; on 
war aims, Siof.; to Pope, 518 f.; 
invites peace, 522 ; on armistice, 523 ; 
goes to Paris, 525; supports League 
of Nations, 526; illness, 527 f.; on 
law and order, 533 ; recommends 
woman suffrage, 534 

Wilson-Gorman Act, 439 

Winchester, battle of, 368 

Winsor, 39 

Winthrop, Governor John, 37 f., 42, 

54 
Wirt, William, 240 
Wise, Governor H. A., 259, 312 
Wolfe, General James, 87 n., 88 
Wood, General Leonard, 460, 502 
"Wood of the American Marines," 520 
Workmen's Compensation Act, 502 n. 
World War, 208, 487, 490 n., 495, 497 
World's Fair, 441 

Writs of Assistance, 95 and n., 97, 99 
Wyeth, Nathaniel, 267 
Wyoming, 430 

XYZ affair, 170 f., 17111. 

Yale college, 65 
Yancey, W. L., 323, 327 
York, Duke of, 45 n. 2, 48 
Yorktown, 122, 135 
Yukon, 397 

Zenger, Peter, 67 
Zimmermann note, 508 



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